Pawns or Pioneers?

Putting poverty into a melting pot of experiences

Round table 16-17 March 2011Interuniversity international Francqui Chair Prof. Dr. Gert Biesta

Griet Roets, postdoctoral researcher (FWO), Department of Social Welfare Studies,

Ghent University

Rudi Roose, Assistant Professor, Department of Social Welfare Studies, GhentUniversity/Associate Professor, Department of Criminology, Free University of Brussels

Based on

Roets, G., Roose, R., Bouverne-De Bie, M., Claes, L., Van Hove, G.

Pawns or Pioneers? Employing peoplewith experience of poverty as experts in public services

Submitted to Critical Social Policy

In a nutshell

Context

• widespread international interest in putting people with experience of poverty in participatory positions as co-workers in order to design, implement and monitor anti-poverty strategies for organisations, public services and policy units (Beresford, 2002; Cook, 2002)

• discussing background developments and findings acquired for a recent research project into public services in Belgium: this innovative project runs from September 2005 until 2011, integrally funded by the European Social Fund (ESF) (see POD MI, 2006; Casman et al., 2010)

Pawns… or pioneers?

• analysing the enacted logic of participation in federal public services

• identifying fundamental risks and challenges if individuals with experience of poverty are employed as poverty experts in order to enable public services to adopt an anti-poverty perspective:

pawns or pioneers?

In the name of participation

• participation functions as a central social policy concept in Western welfare regimes (Lister, 2004), in Belgium as well

• inherently positive and neutral? (Roose, 2005)

• empowering people with experience of poverty to support their direct participation in policy making:

“poverty is a system of social exclusion extending over several areas of our individual and collective existence, which separates poor people from generally accepted ways of living in society. Poor people cannot bridge this gap under their own power” (Vranken, 2007: 36)

“this gap can only be bridged by enhancing the psychological capital of people living in poverty and of their environment” (Van Regenmortel, 2002: 83)

In the name of participation

• poverty is perceived as a non-materialistic and cultural problem rather than a social problem in terms of lack of material as well as social resources

educating people with experience of poverty as experts in order to bridge the gap between middle-class culture and the culture of people in poverty

cf. The Missing Link

employing people with experience of poverty in a specific function as experts in public services in order to bridge the gap existing between people in poverty and the government, specifically demonstrated in the inaccessibility of administrations

Enacted logic of participation

• two different interpretations of the function of people with experience of poverty:

mobilising people with experience of poverty as specific experts

mobilising people with experience of poverty as employees

…as specific experts

• experience of poverty acquired a status of authority and expertise which prevails over the experiences of other employees

• the expert is the individual who is responsible for dealing with the questions and experiences of disadvantaged users, and for solving problems in public service delivery

• reinforces dynamics of social exclusion and the powerful-powerless dualism („us‟/„them‟) through public service delivery

• limited dialogue about poverty within the boundaries of the “poverty think thank”

• tends to recreate and even widen the gap

• an educational project on a collective level is discredited

…as employees

• people with experience of poverty are mobilised under the condition that these public services first explicitly subscribe to anti-poverty politics

• implementation of an anti-poverty perspective is set as a mission statement and a collective concern

• involves questioning structural dynamics of social exclusion

• dynamic in which experience of poverty is valuable in the collective

• participation takes place within “policy making spaces”: the poverty problem is translated as a public issue

• the collective might learn how to share power in the identification and construction of problems, for example problems associated with poverty, and in stipulating joint action

Risks and challenges

on an individual level, individuals with experience of poverty risk acquiring a tragical optimistic position on life

on a collective level, anti-poverty politics risk to govern the poor

…on an individual level

• the educational programme prescribes how individuals are to be educated, trained and empowered (Cruikshank,

1999) outlining how people with experience of poverty will participate even before they are employed

• risk of being trained and employed as the poverty expert, as “expertise lies in the shaping of the self-steering mechanisms of others in relation to certain norms” which may be seen as a decisive element of authority (Miller and Rose, 2004: 149)

…on an individual level

• acquiring an ambiguous social status that we name “tragical optimism”:

an optimistic position for life from a psychological perspective: experience of poverty should be seen as a positive element in their past that can be used professionally, as a triumph card for their future, precisely because they can claim this expertise in having “a great contribution to offer in treating and supporting others (…) who are not that fortunate because they do not manage to change themselves” (Clonen et al., 2009: 13)

a tragic position for life from a social and political perspective: since they have to tailor themselves to the norm of “proper citizens” they cannot get as far as they might expect in their career and remain „one of the poor‟

…on a collective level

• empowerment and participation functions as a hidden strategy of civilisation according to the norm of behaving like a “proper” citizen in order to fit and be fitted in the social order (Miller & Rose, 2008)

• people in poverty risk being little more than physicallypresent in our society („voice‟), as pawns in the broadercontext of anti-poverty policy making, for “there is plenty of evidence here that simply establishing participatory structures and opportunities (…) is no guarantee of their effectiveness” (Lister, 2007: 702)

Issues to consider

How to understand and theorise processes and practices of civic learning?

Civic learning as…

• an individual outcome according to a pre-structured norm of acquiring „poverty expertise‟

• an individual as well as collective process, open and undetermined, as an inherent dimension of the ongoing experiment with democratic projects and politics

…an individual outcome

• an individual outcome of learning: the ultimate goal for poor and socially excluded people is to become “good citizens‟ who need to connect individually with social standards, mainly on behalf of economic interests

• starts from the assumption that political identities are formed and have to be formed before the „event‟ of democratic politics: those who wish to take part in the „game‟ need to meet certain entry conditions

(see The Missing Link)

…an individual outcome

• inscribing politics of recognition/identity politics (Fraser): a political subject “is not a group that „becomes aware‟ of itself, finds its voice, imposes its weight on society”, because establishing oneself as a subject does “not happen before the „act‟ of politics but rather in and through it” (Rancière)

• a civilisation strategy („good‟ citizens): identification with the social and political order in order to reproduce it: socialization conception of citizenship/political identity

…an individual as well as collective process

• both individual and collective processes of learning: democracy always requires the translation and transformation of private troubles into public issues (Wright Mills)

• the „them‟ is no longer perceived and approached as an enemy to be destructed, but as an adversary (Mouffe):

shift from antagonism into agonism

…an individual as well as collective process

• politics of recognition and redistribution of both power and material resources (Fraser): collective dis-identification with the social order as democratic subjectivity is engendered through engagement in an always undetermined experiment: subjectificationconception of citizenship/political subjectivity

• subjectification “redefines the field of experience that gave to each their identity with their lot”; as it “decomposes and recomposes the relationships between the ways of doing, of being and of saying that define the perceptible organization of the community” (Rancière)