Introduction

The development of new spaces within which citizens and officials meet together to deliberate, make and review policy has become a major focus for research within the UK and internationally. Such research has considered, for example, which citizens or service users take part in such initiatives, the deliberative dynamics of participation forums, the disputed issue of representation and representativeness, the capacity of such forums to lead to policy or practice change, the design principles on which they are or might be constructed, and the experiences of citizens and service users within them and the impact this has on them.

Much of this research questions the capacity of such spaces to offer fundamental challenges to the status quo. The ways in which institutional rules and norms act to constrain the potential for change was a key theme of my earlier work with colleagues and we have also considered the power of discursive norms to delimit what are considered acceptable ways of speaking and thus of deliberating policy issues (Barnes et al, 2007). Others have drawn similar conclusions from case studies of user involvement (Church, 1996; Hodge, 2005) and have pointed to a failure to secure major change in service delivery or policy outcomes as a result of sustained user involvement and public participation over many years. One conclusion that has been drawn is that, far from public participation providing opportunities for service users and citizens to become ‘empowered’ through offering major challenge to dominant policy discourses and service delivery practices, the participatory turn within public policy represents one way in which citizens learn to be self-governing subjects (Forbes and Sashidharan, 1997; Rose, 1998; Cruikshank, 1999).

This somewhat pessimistic view of the transformative potential (within the UK and elsewhere) contained within deliberative forums and other participatory spaces is countered by at least some evidence that they can be ‘Spaces for Change’ (Cornwall and Coelho, 2007). If this is the case, might we understand them in any way as spaces in which the resistance and subversion that we are exploring in this book might be both generated and expressed? In this chapter I address one aspect of this: the way in which participatory forums can enable the construction and reconstruction of individual and collective identities of both citizens and officials and thus hold the potential for undermining or subverting assumptions about both identity and expertise.