Introduction

Regulation scholarship has typically been domain-specific, focusing on a particular industry (such as financial services) or a specific legislative domain (such as health and safety). Even when theorising at a general level, it has drawn its theoretical insights from domain-specific research. By contrast, the imaginative heart of each of the explorations laid out in the preceding chapters has been the holistic lived experience of diverse groups of citizens, many of whom described themselves as excluded from regulatory systems. In those experiential spaces, as this book has subsequently shown, multiple regulatory domains criss-cross, fragment and overlap. The specialised knowledges of each domain tend not to talk to each other, and even if they are linked through practices such as ‘joined-up policymaking’, these are often unintelligible to the citizens caught up in this regulatory web.

In generating exploration from the starting point of the lived realities of these citizens, it is fitting that ‘expertise-by-experience’ has been at the conceptual heart of the Productive Margins research programme. Correspondingly, the technocratic specialised expertise of specific regulatory domains has been more in the shadows, though this final chapter does seek to find points of fruitful dialogue with it. However, it is key to the findings of the whole research programme that expertiseby-experience is both sidelined and valuable. It is sidelined by current approaches to regulation, and it is valuable for redressing the limitations of those approaches documented in Chapter 1.

Two examples may bring to life the force of this general point. The first concerns the collectively written novel created by the research project Life Chances (see Chapter 6). This creative methodology involved participants developing characters from lived experience. This meant that it was possible to meld into one coherent narrative the everyday experience of negotiating with asylum and immigration officials, teachers, social workers, homelessness officers, and other regulatory officials. These multiple fields typically operate according to particular siloed logics, but by putting the experience embodied by relational subjects at the centre of the novel's narrative, this particularity moves into the background, melding into cross-cutting ripples of an individual life instead.