Expertise in/of co-Creation: The Care Work of Citizen Participation

Abstract

Recent years have seen substantial interest in, and experiments with, public participation in environmental and scientific research and decision-making. In this paper we explore a case of such citizen participation, a co-creation project that aimed to bring together citizens, researchers, and artists to bring about sustainable futures. Drawing on recent theories of the nature of expertise, we argue for the importance of understanding it as involving practices of care, attachment, and affect. In investigating how expertise is performed and negotiated within this case, we find that expertise is distributed across the project, including in the work of organising it. This organisational work, in particular, often involves engagement with the moral imperatives of participation and with embodied and relational skills necessary to it. The analysis thus contributes to discussion of the ways in which different forms of expertise may be present in citizen participation in science, and to understanding the kinds of skills that are necessary for successfully supporting such participation.

Introduction

It is now several decades since calls emerged to integrate public participation into scientific and environmental governance (e.g., Fiorino, 1990; Irwin, 1995; Limoges, 1993), and some 20 years since scholars of such participation began to express frustration with how it was being realised (Delgado et al., 2011; Irwin, 2001; Powell & Colin, 2009). Noting that participatory processes often served as a form of legitimation without real effects, or that it reproduced existing hierarchies, participation was framed as a ‘tyranny’ (Cooke & Kothari, 2001) or as a ‘problem’ rather than a solution (Delgado et al., 2011). Concurrently, over this period the world around these efforts has shifted dramatically. Anxieties have arisen around the place of expertise in contemporary societies, resulting in renewed attention to the nature of expert knowledge (Caudill, 2023). Commentators within and beyond social studies of science have discussed what expertise is, where it is located, and how and why it seems to be (perhaps increasingly) contested. For at least some scholars, interest in citizen participation meant that the idea of expertise was being extended too far, and is therefore under threat (Collins & Evans, 2002).

In this paper we engage with these developments by examining expertise in an example of citizen participation, a co-creation project that aims to bring together citizens, researchers, and artists to bring about sustainable futures. Specifically, we demonstrate some of the ways in which practices of citizen participation can enable expertise to be distributed throughout a participatory process, while also arguing for an expanded understanding of the nature of expertise that takes care and relational work into account. This view of expertise allows us to attend not only to the ways in which diverse knowledges are present (and are acknowledged) within public participation, but to how this is enabled through skilled practices involving care and affect. By exploring expertise in co-creation we end by identifying expertise of co-creation, in the sense of the skilled work of realising public participation. Our discussion thus contributes to research on the different forms of expertise that may be present in citizen participation in science (cf. Krick & Meriluoto, 2022), and to understanding the kinds of capacities that are necessary for successfully supporting such participation (cf. Chilvers, 2008a).

In what follows we outline the literatures to which we are contributing before discussing contemporary theories of expertise and the ways in which we mobilise these. We then introduce the co-creation project that is the subject of our analysis and our research engagement with it, and present our empirical findings in two sections: first, we outline how expertise is distributed across diverse sites and actors within the project, including (and especially) being attributed to citizens; and second, we describe the expertise of co-creation that allows this to happen. In closing we reflect on implications for citizen participation and for thinking on expertise.

Expertise in and for Citizen Participation

As noted, there is now a long history of experiments in citizen participation in science, and a substantial literature associated with this. While there is not scope to review this literature in depth within this paper (see Chilvers & Kearnes, 2016; Stilgoe et al., 2014; Weingart et al., 2021 for overviews), it is important to note that much of this work has outlined the failures of (particular) participatory processes to redistribute (acknowledgement of) knowledge, expertise, or agency. As early as 2001 Alan Irwin described the limited version of citizenship that was produced through one UK public consultation on the biosciences, noting that “participants appear as essentially reactive members of the public rather than as citizens in any more active sense of that term” (p.13), while others have criticised public participation activities as toothless processes utilised to legitimise policy decisions and that assume passive, ‘empty slate’ publics (Felt & Fochler, 2010; Hagendijk & Irwin, 2006; Lezaun & Soneryd, 2007; Powell & Colin, 2009; Weingart et al., 2021). For Wynne and others, public participation was ‘hitting the notes but missing the music’ (Wynne, 2006) by aiming to achieve public trust rather than allowing the expression of public expertise and values.

As participation has become institutionalised, there has been interest in those who organise and realise it, and in how this institutionalisation has brought about an industry that provides ‘experts of community’ (Rose, 1999) to those in need of support (Lee, 2014). Jason Chilvers (2008a, 2008b) frames such experts as an emergent epistemic community, one that, even in the early 2000s, was alert to the tensions between “the dual need for professional leadership while democratising PA [participatory appraisal] expertise through building wider capacity and self-regulating citizen-led processes” (2008b, p. 3005). Indeed, studies of these experts, and the institutions they may work within, have signalled the development and circulation of technocratic knowledges around public participation (Voß & Amelung, 2016; Voß et al., 2022), while at the same time indicating that it is often challenging to embed participation into extant institutions and policy practices (Chilvers, 2013; Krabbenborg & Mulder, 2015). While those who organise and carry out public participation may be clear as to the skills and practices necessary to this (for instance the need to “ensure diversity, difference, and otherness” within participatory processes; Chilvers, 2008a, p. 178), it seems likely that they are often constrained by the institutional settings they work within (Smallman, 2020).

Expertise is thus central to discussions of public participation, both in terms of those who carry it out and those who do the participation. Arguments for public participation in science were often predicated on the idea that laypeople possessed substantive expertise relevant to research and decision-making on it (Fiorino, 1990), while scholarly engagement with the topic has used terms such as ‘lay experts’, ‘experts by experience’, or ‘citizen experts’ (e.g., Kerr et al., 1998). On the one hand, citizens can act as something like experts of the public good, contributing “local perspectives and values to policy decisions” (Kinsella, 2004, p. 95). On the other, they might have epistemic contributions to make, for instance in the form of ‘local knowledge’ concerning a particular site or knowledge based on being ‘service users’ (Krick, 2022; Meriluoto & Kuokkanen, 2022; Pedersen et al., 2022). Other work has more strongly argued for the value of alternative or resistant epistemologies found in lay communities: Gwen Ottinger, for instance, has written of the ‘epistemic innovation’ that takes place in citizen-led citizen science, ¹ in which new “concepts, categories, and metrics that help us understand the world and our experiences of it” are developed (2022, p. 2). Attention to such resources by practitioners is vital, she argues, because:

For marginalized groups, whose experiences tend to be poorly represented by dominant concepts and categories … epistemic innovation can be vital to changing the conversation about social and environmental injustices (Ottinger, 2022, p. 2)

Engagement with the knowledges of those outside mainstream science is thus a justice issue, as well as epistemically productive. The presence of epistemic diversity within participatory processes (and other spaces in which researchers and laypeople interact) is also implied by work that has sought to clarify the kinds of scientific knowledge that are useful to citizens (Mach et al., 2020; McNie et al., 2016; Nguyen et al., 2019), though here the aim is primarily to avoid research that is “ignored or greeted with skepticism by practitioners” (Nguyen et al., 2019, p. 463). Such work has noted that expert knowledge is often assessed differently by different communities (McNie et al., 2016): as such, it can be understood as relational in nature – an idea that we explore more thoroughly in the following section.

Conceptualising Expertise

In recent years there has been no shortage of efforts to understand the nature of expert knowledge, particularly with regard to how and why it may be questioned (Caudill, 2023; Collins & Evans, 2007; Grundmann, 2017; 2022; Hilgartner, 2000; Mehlenbacher, 2022; Nunn, 2008). Many of these accounts converge around an idea of expertise as relational - “something delivered at the request of someone else who wants it” (Grundmann, 2017, p. 26) - and practiced: “achieved by a complex negotiation with an audience” (Mehlenbacher, 2022, p. 3). ² In this view (which we share), expertise is not a static characteristic of particular actors but is performed in a particular context to a particular audience, through the demonstration or attribution of relevant skills or knowledge. Certainly, aspects of such performances are likely to relate to qualities such as experience, wisdom, or objectivity (Hilgartner, 2000; Nunn, 2008), given that at base expertise is generally understood as “special knowledge or skill” (Nunn, 2008, p. 416) that one grows into “as one moves from novice to expert thinking” (Mehlenbacher, 24). But in this view expertise is less something that one has, and more something that is achieved or attributed.

From this perspective examining expertise in citizen participation is less about assuming expertise on the part of citizens (or other actors), and more about exploring how and in which ways expertise is performed and acknowledged. For such exploration we might draw on parallel scholarship on expertise that has attempted to classify or categorise it. For instance, Collins and Evans (2007) differentiate between contributory and interactional expertise, where the latter is “the ability to master the language of a specialist domain in the absence of practical competence” (p.14). Interactional expertise is thus an expertise of mediation, of ‘interchange’ and ‘interdisciplinary research’ (ibid), and something that we might expect to find performed in citizen participation. Similarly, Mehlenbacher (2022) argues that expertise should be understood as being comprised by episteme (‘knowing that’), techne (‘knowing how’), and phronesis (‘knowing why’), and calls for attention to “how such forms of knowledge are invoked in particular situations” (p.3). Different dimensions of expertise may be called upon in different contexts, but Mehlenbacher's interest is particularly in reinstating awareness of phronesis, or practical wisdom and morality, into ideas about expertise. As she writes:

Centering phronesis in the theorizing of expertise serves to demonstrate two important capacities of expert thinking. The first is a kind of practical knowledge to make good decisions. The second, intrinsic of the first, is a practical moral knowledge, as a capacity to make the best decision. Expertise is born of a social relationship between someone who has certain capacities that others do not, can perform certain tasks that others cannot, or has knowledge that others do not. (Mehlenbacher, 2022, p. 138)

In this view expertise is not only relational, but embodies moral judgements and capacities, and is tied to attachment and affect. Similar to theorisations of care, attentiveness to phronesis can thus point to the ways in which expertise may be enacted through practices of concern and efforts to “maintain, continue, and repair our world” (Tronto, 1998, p. 16; cf. Puig de la Bellacasa, 2011). It directs us to the ways in which expertise may be performed not only with reference to epistemic or practical capacities (such as objectivity or skillfulness), but as a form of authority based on attachment or ethics. Viewing phronesis as one aspect of expert practice thus frames affective work, “devalued ordinary labours” (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2011, p. 93), and the generation of care as components of expertise.

Studying the ‘Hub’

It is with this multi-faceted view of expertise in mind that we will explore our case of citizen participation, with the aim of understanding how expertise is performed and materialised within it. While there is a continuing proliferation of formats and frameworks for public participation in research and its governance, in this paper we are concerned with a co-creation project. Along with other innovation-oriented frameworks and participatory practices (Delvenne & Macq, 2019; Macq et al., 2020; de Saille, 2015), co-creation has its roots in business and in the notion of the co-creation of (economic or technical) value (Jansma et al., 2021; Robinson et al., 2021). It can, however, be conceptualised as a more radical form of citizen participation, in which to co-create means to ‘empower [citizens and stakeholders] to make decisions’ (Metz et al., 2019). Our case, which emphasises interdisciplinary collaboration “between civil society, science and arts” and “[i]ncreasing democracy through offering possibilities for participation” ³ can be situated within this tradition. As we will discuss, it involves sustained efforts to hand over agency and resources to civil society actors, rather than maintaining traditional sources of epistemic authority.

This co-creation project - which we will refer to as the ‘Hub’ ⁴ - is a collaboration between two Vienna research organisations. The goal of the Hub is to facilitate, enable, and foster research projects which are in line with the UN's Sustainable Development Goals. Specifically, the aim is to bring together researchers, civil society actors, and artists: it “enables and supports new possibilities of collaborations between society, science and art” so as to “advance the sustainable transformation of society”. Importantly, the Hub does not do this through a single line of research, but acts as a platform, funding a number of projects but also offering legal counselling, capability building workshops (for instance around project planning, impact mapping, or reflective methods), and networking activities. The Hub's basic principle - as stated in documentation about it and by its organisers - is the value of transdisciplinary collaboration and co-creation of knowledge by academic researchers and societal and civic actors.

At the time of writing the Hub has funded six co-creation projects with a variety of foci, from the organisation of citizen juries on traffic to increasing the accessibility of hacker and makerspaces to deaf and hard of hearing people. (For the sake of clarity, from this point on we will refer to the overarching co-creation project as the Hub, and the smaller sub-projects as the projects.) As we will discuss, each project receives funding, but the Hub also offers other kinds of support on both individual and collective levels, and is framed as a space for interaction and learning between those involved in the projects. Logics of connection are therefore central to it, as noted in one document: “We are convinced that interaction between the projects can open a wonderful space for mutual learning and growth”. ⁵ Materially, this is realised through a variety of structures. The Hub employs a coordinator, who interacts with a ‘management board’ comprised of representatives from the two research organisations as well as a ‘sustainability board’ of external specialists in environmental and social sustainability, artistic, interdisciplinary, and scientific research, and civic activism, and connects these to those involved in the six projects. The Hub has a dedicated space within one of the research organisations where workshops and other activities are held. In addition, the Hub's funders have commissioned artistic and social research projects that follow its activities and engage with the co-creation projects. It is the latter, the social science research project, that has led to this article.

Our research engages with the Hub through a long-term multi-sited ethnography (Marcus, 1995). This involves regular field visits, participant observation, semi-structured qualitative interviews with Hub participants, stakeholders, and project staff, and digital ethnography of public communication relating to it. In practice this has meant that the two authors have ‘followed’ and participated in the Hub's activities over the course of the two years in which it was operational, carrying out 14 formal interviews (with Hub staff and project participants regarding their experiences and expectations of the Hub), writing field notes regarding participant observation of some 30 meetings and events and our conversations at these, and collecting and analysing online and other forms of documentation around the Hub (such as its newsletters). This body of material was collated in Atlas.ti, categorised with regard to type of empirical material (such as transcript, field note, background material, or Hub documentation), and repeatedly read and coded using an abductive approach (Timmermans & Tavory, 2012). While we have been open to understanding the meanings that emerge from engaging with the Hub and its participants regarding their activities in the tradition of exploratory ethnography (Hammersley & Atkinson, 1995), we have been particularly interested in its organisational dimensions: how this instance of co-creation is organised, and how it relates to the two research organisations that jointly initiated and fund it. Our coding and analysis have therefore been particularly concerned with the structures and flows that comprise the Hub, and, in the context of this article, with the ways in which expertise is performed and negotiated through these. As such, and in order to protect the confidentiality of participants, our discussion will not focus on individual project activities but rather on the Hub's organisational practices. In the empirical discussion that follows we quote from interviews and field notes, but also draw more generally on the knowledge we have developed of the Hub through this ethnographic fieldwork in order to describe dynamics within it.

In the next sections we discuss how expertise becomes visible in the Hub, focusing on two central observations. First, and contrary to at least some studies of public participation, we find substantial efforts embedded in the organisation and practices of the Hub to acknowledge and foreground the expertise of citizens, and to prioritise this over traditional sources of epistemic authority (such as university researchers). Second, we find that the Hub is organised (and this redistribution of expertise enabled) through a further set of expert practices, those that relate to carrying out co-creation itself. While others have observed the development of technocratic knowledges around public participation (Voß & Amelung, 2016; Voß et al., 2022), in this case such expertise involves not only episteme and techne (to use Mehlenbacher's language), but phronesis: it is moral, affective, and realised through the care-ful creation of attachments and relations. As such it is also local and specific. In closing we reflect on some of the implications of these findings.

Prioritising Citizen Expertise in co-Creation

The Hub, as we have noted, positions itself within a tradition of co-creation that seeks the empowerment of citizens. Indeed, for at least one of the academic partners - a research institute with longstanding activities in the area of open science and innovation - the Hub's development was framed as emerging out of learning from previous efforts to open up research. Earlier activities had focused on training researchers in open science and on encouraging research projects that integrated citizen engagement. While at least some of this work had been successful, particularly in inspiring researchers to engage users and patients, in the end:

…all of them go back in the institutions, you know, they had to go for publications and articles … [there was] maybe not really a recognition for someone who wants to kind of work openly with [users], you know, or no funding for it. Maybe not support for it. (Interview with management board member)

Those involved found themselves frustrated by traditional academic contexts: even where the institute had succeeded in interesting and inspiring scientists to work in an open and societally engaged manner, as soon as the funding or training ended, those scientists returned to institutional contexts in which publications and other traditional markers of academic success were valued over and above citizen engagement. There was a need, this interviewee said, to “set up something new”. The Hub thus emerged as an explicit effort to reject dominant models of citizen participation - in which it is often tacked on to a pre-existing scientific project or line of research - and find a model for allowing those with different forms of expertise to work together to “address societal challenges”. In negotiating the partnership with the other academic organisation this meant explicitly seeking to innovate, even where this was not necessarily comfortable for academic involvement. One point of contention, for instance, had been the composition of the sustainability board, which - as well as acting as a source of advice throughout the life of the Hub - formed the jury for assessing projects. The fact that this jury was a “mixed expert jury” involving “experts from civil society” as well as academics had been “a huge discussion internally” (to quote the same management board member), though one that was eventually resolved in favour of this mixed composition.

The integration of citizen expertise into the sustainability board and the vision of ‘doing things differently’ came to shape the realisation of the Hub in a number of ways. In particular, what became apparent during the early stages of the partnership was a vision where projects might not emerge from universities or researchers, but from civil society, with academic researchers and the Hub as ancillary resources rather than the lead agents. As a board member said:

…we said, okay, we would like to have this collaboration between society and science. But it can be triggered by society, you know […] So a lot of the projects are not coming out of academia but coming from somewhere else. (Interview with management board member)

Significant energy was therefore invested in rendering the Hub's application process for project funding accessible to those outside the academy: using inclusive and accessible language in the open call was prioritised, the proposal involved a relatively concise and flexible format, and workshops were offered to potential applicants, all with the aim of ensuring that applicants with no academic background or previous experience in writing research funding applications were not excluded. Similarly, the coordinator worked extensively with applicants to help them understand what was required of proposals, including assisting with budgeting. In the end the six projects that were funded all involve research questions and goals that have been formulated by citizens, and are primarily led by those outside the academy. ⁶

An emphasis on the expertise of citizens and civil society actors has continued through the lifetime of the Hub. This is perhaps particularly apparent in its continued framing as a resource for those involved in the projects, something that should respond to their needs and equip and empower the individuals involved in them, rather than imposing modes of thinking and working from academic research. For instance, one internal document specifically describes the Hub as a ‘peer network’:

The ASF Hub builds and supports a peer network to enable collaborations between the [individual] projects by organising regular meetings and space for exchange. The goal of this network is for the projects to cooperate, ranging from interpersonal support to project related activities. ⁷

The aim has thus been not only to support citizen expertise by financing citizen-led projects, but to facilitate an environment where citizen-led co-creation can take place. Writing about their aims for a kick-off event involving the six funded projects, for instance, the coordinator notes that they had wanted “to ask the projects what they need in regard to support and also to see what expertise the other projects have so that they can support each other”. Here ‘needs’ are defined by those from civil society involved in the projects, with the Hub - and specifically the coordinator - working to respond to and meet these. Similarly, the quote suggests that expertise is understood as being located in the projects themselves, with the expert knowledge of citizens as much of a resource and ‘support’ as that of the scholars on the sustainability board or in the academy more generally. Others similarly framed the Hub as a kind of mediator, a structure which project participants could approach with specific needs or requests. “The added value of the Hub”, said one management board member, is that project participants could approach it with a topic or theme and “the Hub can always say, yes, no problem, we can suggest these three experts and perhaps also two that you don’t even know you need”. ⁸ Similar to participatory formats such as science shops (Leydesdorff & Ward, 2005), the Hub is therefore understood as an enabler of citizen research, functioning as a point of exchange and connection between different forms of expertise rather than a means of embedding citizens into pre-existing academic research trajectories.

Organising co-Creation

The Hub's role as an enabler of citizen-led research and its foregrounding of citizen expertise were doubtless imperfectly realised: there were moments when more traditional epistemic hierarchies were reimposed, or when project participants felt that their expertise, priorities, or needs were not recognised. At the same time its organisation and framing as a platform or resource signals significant efforts to reimagine citizen participation away from the kind of ‘tacked on’ participatory activities that it was created as a response to, and towards funding and support of citizen-led epistemic work. In tracing how expertise is discussed and performed in the Hub we therefore find that it is situated in diverse sites, including in the activities of citizens and civil society (as in the reference to the “expertise the other projects have” in the quote above).

How is this redistribution of expertise enabled? It is clear from both this research and from the literature discussed above that foregrounding citizen expertise in public participation does not happen particularly readily: the default is to prioritise the knowledge, interests, and practices of those in the academy, around which participation is generally oriented (cf. Delvenne & Macq, 2019; Irwin, 2001). Prioritising citizen knowledges and values in co-creation takes effort as well as specific organisational structures and practices and is itself a skilled practice (Chilvers, 2008a). In this section we outline how this expert work is articulated in the Hub, and in particular argue that phronesis - the moral and care dimensions of expertise - is central to it.

Organising co-creation in the Hub involved a range of different kinds of work, from the workshops and support offered to applicants to building relationships with and between participants or arranging for the provision of particular intellectual resources. The coordinator role has been particularly central, offering a means of aligning the two organisations involved in setting up the Hub, the experts and expertise represented by the sustainability board, and those involved in the six projects. Their work requires having access to particular kinds of knowledge (such as theories of citizen participation, understanding how epistemic hierarchies operate, or knowing how budgeting for the Hub functions) and having particular skills (such as being able to moderate a workshop, offer accommodations for neurodiverse participants, or create good communication formats). We see this, for example, in a field note from the Hub's kick off event:

The internal kick off event, which all project staff attended, is the first formal setting for everyone to meet everyone and to see who the Hub is. Due to these pandemic times, we are meeting online, and our host asks us to add our role in the Hub next to our names (for instance project name, whether we are there as a researcher). Following a warm welcome, the project coordinator explains the technical details of today's session: parallel to the Zoom meeting, we will be working collaboratively on a Miro Board, view at least one Power Point Presentation, and a captioner will simultaneously deliver a speech-to-text translation on another platform in order to ensure accessibility (Field note, Kick Off Meeting)

The coordinator thus ‘took care’ both of the practicalities of meeting together – for instance by ensuring that participants’ roles were visible to others – and of the accessibility of the event, ensuring that could be experienced across a number of different formats. In such activities we thus find expertise as episteme - ‘knowing that’ - and techne, ‘knowing how’ (Mehlenbacher, 2022). But while such knowledge and skills are certainly necessary to organising co-creation in the Hub, they are not sufficient - or, rather, what has emerged from our ethnographic work is that there is a widely shared sense that care-related, relational, and moral practices are central to the way that the Hub is able to function (as in the ‘warm welcome’ described in the extract above). Practical knowledge and skills are effective because they are performed in combination with phronesis, the ‘knowing why’ of such activities, and with care, in the sense of nurturing attachment, commitment, and shared well being (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2011).

This is demonstrated, for example, by the frequent references to trust and trust-building in the empirical material. Much of the expertise of co-creation found in the Hub was located in the coordinator, its sole dedicated employee who had its day to day management as their responsibility. This figure - whom we will call Ellis - quickly became framed as central to the Hub, both in organisational terms (given that, as noted, they acted as the interface between the different groups and individuals involved in it) and with regard to embodying its spirit. “They enjoy it” and “feel as if the projects were their own”, said one project participant of Ellis in an interview. They seemed genuinely happy to hear about news and updates, “and when there are any concerns, they are almost always available, no questions asked”. ⁹ More than this, Ellis became a key object of trust thanks to what was experienced as their proactive approach to engaging with project participants, sensitivity to interpersonal relations and participants’ diverse needs, and the opportunities for vulnerability and honest discussion that they created. This trust meant that they became even more central as an intermediary between different actors. Reflecting on a workshop provided for project participants that was experienced as inaccessible, they explain that:

One lesson I certainly take from this is that I need to involve myself more into the workshops given for the Hub, in a moderating or explaining role. Because the project teams trust me and if it comes from me then it is more accepted. This sounds a bit weird and maybe I’m exaggerating my role, but I really feel that if I had held the workshop, the criticism wouldn’t have been as harsh, I could have felt the target audience better and I could have also confronted the criticism better.

Ellis is trusted by the project teams because they (Ellis) ‘feel’ - understand and empathise with - them, the teams. The more the coordinator knows about the individual persons or groups, the better they can transfer information or translate decisions made by the management board into organisational practices, rendering such information or decisions meaningful to and useful for project participants. Trust - and workable relationships within the Hub - is thus ensured by deep engagement with project participants at the level of affect, as well as of knowledge or information exchange. It was clear, for instance, that Ellis came to embody knowledge about the Hub, to some extent replacing the need for documentation about it:

I ask where detailed information on and insight into individual projects lie. Ellis says “me!” and everyone laughs. (Field note, management board meeting)

Becoming trusted - and thereby performing trustworthiness alongside technical aspects of expertise such as being able to organise events - was central to enabling co-creation and to allowing the Hub to be experienced as a space in which citizen expertise was recognised. Part of the development of such trust was the sense that care was being exercised in the organisation of the Hub. “I didn’t want the Hub to be a playground or an experimenting field”, noted Ellis of the support activities the Hub provided. “I think the projects deserve the best workshops by experienced experts.” Seeking the best for the projects - caring for them and ensuring that they have the resources that they need - often involved a high degree of tailoring of activities and individualised care, as well as care-ful communication.

Ellis gleaned information about project and participant needs in various ways, for example by staying closely in touch and meeting regularly, or by providing forms and online tools for project participants to fill out. Communication and engagement was highly personalised. For instance, Ellis crafted individual letters to unsuccessful applicants giving them feedback, accompanied project participants to bureaucratic meetings with City of Vienna officials so as to provide emotional support, offered to help them write follow-up applications for further funding, and cultivated relationships at an individual as well as collective level. Tailoring meant ensuring that specific needs were met, whether that was caring for how neurodiverse participants could comfortably participate in workshops or ensuring that communication was accessible to the deaf and hard of hearing community by having sign language interpreters at Hub events. Communication strategies, vocabulary, and workshop offers and content were therefore constantly being adapted to meet the needs of project participants, while taking care to avoid reproducing epistemic hierarchies or dominance.

While organising the Hub certainly involved expertise in the form of knowledge and skill, then, these were intertwined with phronesis as “a practical moral knowledge … born of a social relationship between someone who has certain capacities that others do not” (Mehlenbacher, 2022, p. 138). Nurturing relationships within the Hub became central to the performance of this ‘moral wisdom’ as a means of foregrounding and supporting citizen-led research. Trust was established through care-ful practices of tailored support: it was this, as much as particular forms of knowledge, that comprised the expert work of organising co-creation.

Discussion: Negotiating Expertise

In following how expertise is performed and negotiated in this instance of co-creation we have made two broad arguments: that the structure of the Hub, and the guiding vision behind it, locate expertise in citizens as well as in academic research; and that its organisation requires a form of expert practice that is as much about care and moral wisdom as knowledge and skills. In tracing expertise we thus find acknowledgement of, and efforts to foreground and prioritise, the epistemic work of citizens, alongside forms of expertise that transcend the epistemic to incorporate what Collins and Evans (2007) refer to as interactional expertise - the ability to act as a point of mediation or interchange - and what Mehlenbacher (2022) terms phronesis, the ‘knowing why’ of co-creation. Within the Hub, expertise is multi-faceted but differentially distributed, with diverse forms of expertise located in different sites.

It is important to note that these are overarching arguments concerning patterns of how expertise is enacted in the Hub, and do not represent a static situation. Indeed, as we would expect from prior work on expertise as relational and performed (e.g., Grundmann, 2017; Hilgartner, 2000), expertise - and who is an expert - is in practice constantly under negotiation within the Hub. As noted, the underlying vision behind the project as a whole was (inevitably) imperfectly realised, and there were moments when traditional hierarchies prioritising academic knowledge were reinscribed, when the nature of expertise was contested and the expertise of particular individuals rejected, and when the expert work of organising co-creation failed, was ignored, or was called into question. In particular we should acknowledge that the expanded conceptualisation of expertise that we have worked with - in which it is comprised not only of knowledge and skills, but of interactional abilities, care, and affect - has been central to being able to identify expertise of co-creation as well as in co-creation. We have shown that organising co-creation requires significant capacities not only in terms of knowledge but of interactional skill, empathy, and care work, but, importantly, these capacities may not be readily labelled or understood as expert practices. Indeed, one of the negotiations at stake within the Hub is exactly of what it takes to organise co-creation and who has the capabilities to do so. Our analysis therefore identifies central patterns within an ever-changing landscape, rather than stable or always successful performances of expertise.

One important finding is that the organisation of forms of public participation such as co-creation should be understood as expert work, requiring specific abilities and capacities, but that this expertise cannot be reduced to technical knowledge and skills. As such our research contributes to scholarship that has examined the ‘epistemic communities’ of public participation (Chilvers, 2008a, 2008b; Voß & Amelung, 2016), but expands this through a notion of expertise as incorporating care and affective work. The Hub's success as a format that supports and enables citizen-led research and the acknowledgement of citizen expertise was in part due to structural decisions, such as a sustainability board comprised of diverse kinds of experts and the decision to support applications from civil society as well as academia, but it has also relied on the creation of trust through the ways in which projects and participants were cared for by, in particular, the coordinator. Phronesis as an aspect of expert practice is highly relational, and the Hub has therefore involved attachments and relations involving affect, care, and constant adaptation to participants’ needs. This is work that is, on the one hand, easily ignored or taken for granted and, on the other, highly demanding. Our impression from ethnographic engagement with the Hub is that this care work and commitment to the moral rationales for co-creation have been central to its atmosphere but also laborious, requiring, for example, personalised rather than standardised internal communication, investment of time and energy in building relationships, and the development of emotional attachments. One implication is thus that it is vital to acknowledge that supporting and enabling citizen participation demands expertise with regard to caring for participation as well technical knowledge and practical skills. The demanding nature of this kind of work should also be recognised. As with other forms of care work within academic settings (Heijstra et al., 2017), relational and emotion work in enabling citizen involvement in research is likely to be readily ignored and/or poorly rewarded. The challenge for funders of such participatory projects and programmes, then, is how to acknowledge and reward those who take on the expert work of caring for participation.

A related point concerns discussions regarding citizen participation as a (potentially) technocratic practice. As noted above, other scholarship has observed the development of technocratic knowledges around public participation, and its emergence as a globalised and standardised field of expert practice – what Chilvers calls the “technocracy of participation” (Chilvers, 2008b, p. 178; Voß & Amelung, 2016; Voß et al., 2022). As participation and engagement have become mainstream aspects of democratic governance and science policy, a central irony has emerged: “The procedures of participation that initially targeted technocratic modes of decision-making gave rise to a new kind of trans-local expertise and attempts to establish epistemic authority in support of certain modes and procedures of public participation” (Voß & Amelung, 2016, p. 763). Strikingly, what we find in the Hub is a form of expertise of co-creation that does not reify epistemic authority regarding how to carry out participation, but that incorporates care and relational work and that is therefore intrinsically local. Set at a slight remove to some of the dynamics that Voß and others describe (in which formats for participation travel across national and regional contexts and become codified as standardised ‘best practices’), the Hub therefore offers insights into what it might mean to recognise the organisation of public participation as dependent on expert practices whilst insisting that part of this expertise is engagement with the affective, local, and specific. Contrary to reinstating epistemic hierarchies, the Hub provides one example of how citizen participation might be envisaged as a space of epistemic diversity and, in particular, of diverse forms of expertise with regard to epistemic, interactional, and affective work.

Conclusion

In sum, the Hub serves as an instance of citizen participation that is in many respects successful in acknowledging expert knowledge outside of traditional institutions. It also demonstrates what is necessary to ensuring this: skilled work in organising public participation and prioritising citizen expertise, particularly that involving care and relational capacities. It is one example of the ways in which public participation formats and practices have matured over the past decades. While some participatory activities continue to prioritise academic and technoscientific knowledges and the needs of ‘innovation’ (Delvenne & Macq, 2019; Macq et al., 2020), others, such as the Hub, are putting agency and resources into the hands of citizens. Programmes such as The Ideas Fund in the UK (Ideas Fund, 2023), which give funds to communities to develop their own research, or global movements towards epistemic justice (Ottinger, 2022) make the point that citizen participation should not necessarily mean participating in pre-existing academic structures or projects, but being enabled to take the lead in the epistemic projects that they find important. As the Hub also demonstrates, doing this will not happen naturally or easily within cultures and contexts that remain dominated by traditional hierarchies of knowledge and by the assumed authority of academic expertise. Supporting and enabling citizen-led research involves not just knowledge and skills, but care and affective work that can enable trust-based relationships. In this respect, exploring expertise in this instance of co-creation indicates the value of diversity with regard to epistemic systems but also to expert practice more generally.