Regulating with Social Justice in Mind: an Experiment in Re-imagining the State

Regulation is a central role of states as they seek to protect citizens from the consequences of global markets and unfettered competition. However, in recent years regulation has become a key target of the anti-statist, anti-expert political mobilisations witnessed, for example, in the discourse around the UK exiting the European Union. This chapter draws on understandings developed in the course of a programme of research that drew on the experiences and expertise of communities at the margins in order to re-imagine regulatory systems and practices. We explore the current state of regulation scholarship and practice arguing that much regulation creates relatively closed circuits of regulators, companies and other technocratic intermediaries, generally excluding citizens. We then interrogate four themes that emerged in the research programme: expertise, experience, deliberation and creativity that arise, outlining strategies used to foster a collaborative approach. We conclude by arguing for the reimagination of politics as an integral element of any attempt to ‘reimagine the state'. This requires developing and maintain infrastructure that can support the emergence of expertise by experience, enable community-level understandings of social justice to come to the fore, and allow space for difference.