Resistance to epistemic silencing in social services: User strategies for enhancing responsiveness

The injunction for citizens to participate in the conduct of public affairs (Blondiaux, 2022) has not bypassed social work. Users of social services have increasingly been called upon to take part in processes within the organisations and institutions that support them. In France, a law passed in 2002 renders mandatory ‘social life councils’ or other participatory bodies in services under certain conditions. Separately, democratic innovations such as citizen’s assemblies at national, regional, or local levels offer new spaces for participating in the development of social policy and practice (see e.g. the ongoing children’s assembly on child protection in the Yvelines). While the ‘participatory turn’ has been studied extensively by scholars of democratic theory, the focus has largely been on input legitimacy rather than on the responsiveness of policy to citizen’s voices (Pogrebinschi ‘getting organised’ (Lister, 2021) collectively to influence power dynamics present between social services and users; ‘reclaiming’ invited (Cornwall, 2004) or induced (Mansuri & Rao, 2013) spaces, and ‘exiting’, i.e. choosing to renounce from social support altogether (where possible). At ESPANet, we will present the participatory and qualitative methodology designed for this study and, drawing on empirical material, outline the strategies that seek to enhance the responsiveness of social services to citizen voices. The underlying theme of this paper is a trend observed among interviewees: service users demand greater control over the support they receive, and they seek participation that goes beyond mere consultation (Hofer et al., 2024). When official channels fail to bring about desired changes, users design creative agentic strategies – whether implicit or explicit – to amplify their voices. The findings suggest that social policy and social work that draws on the experiential knowledge of users should look outside formal participatory processes. We show that beyond the influence of social workers on policy, social service users themselves contribute to the evolution of policies and practices – though sometimes this occurs in the background.