Confronting technocratic expertise: Citizen empowerment and deliberative policy inquiry

This chapter examines the renewed interest in technocratic politics in recent years. In response to the failures of governance, technocracy has turned in many places from a negative opprobrium to a positive recommendation. As an effort to sideline decisions made or influenced by “uninformed citizens,” the practices of technocratic policymaking have become prominent in the corridors of power. At the same time, these initiatives have in other spheres confronted serious criticisms. One the one hand, they have been heavily criticized by democratic thinkers; and on the other, they have confronted opposition from populist movements on both the political right and the left. As an alternative approach to address the technocratic challenge, this chapter turns to citizen participation and deliberative policy analysis and presents two case illustrations, one from Denmark and the other from Thailand. Both cases illustrate the need for alternative forms of expert knowledge.