Regulating  for engagement

Our title Productive Margins: Regulating for Engagement encapsulates the principal elements of our research agenda. In the term productive margins we embody an understanding that people and communities excluded from participation in the regulatory regimes that impact upon their daily lives have expertise, experience and creativity that can be politically productive.

Our research programme seeks to release these capacities, using this energy to co-produce new ways of envisioning and engaging regulation. Communities are tired of endless ‘consultations’, desiring instead bottom-up mechanisms arising out of the everyday lives of those who are caught up in regulatory regimes. Our claim is these regimes can be redesigned and harnessed for engagement, ensuring communities at the margins are engaged in regulatory processes and practices.

Together we will shift debates from the regulation of engagement to regulation for engagement.

Productive Margins research forum

The Forum is not a conventional advisory board, nor does it follow a familiar model of ‘partnership’ dominated by powerful actors. Rather it is itself a site of experimentation.