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There is an urgent need to rethink the relationships between systems of government and those who are ‘governed’. The contemporary transfer of state regulation to the market-based regulation of corporate interests has marginalised many communities in the regulatory systems of everyday life.Exploring a broad range of intersecting areas including immigration, social work, food regulation, space and surveillance, older people, ethnicity and faith, this book takes a ‘bottom up’ approach that brings to the fore the experiences and expertise of these communities in order to examine ways that we can better design regulatory systems that support the knowledge and creativity of citizens.

Increasingly people in the UK are turning to voluntary sector advice organisations for help and support in dealing with everyday problems. Here we argue that advice organisations, who work in the borderlands of law, are nevertheless key players in legal arenas, focusing on local Citizens Advice offices supporting clients with employment problems. We look at the making of advisers as border-workers through programmes which turn volunteers into employment advisers; and the paid advisers who inhabit spaces on the edges of the profession. We examine the social practices of these advisers, the ways in which law-work becomes translation and advice-work becomes a process of co-production between adviser and client. In concluding, we consider how far into the legal arena it is possible to go with limited resources; and what happens when translating the technicalities of law no longer works. Translation comes to mean advisers turning to their activist-selves and adopting political tactics.Las autoras del artículo argumentamos que las organizaciones de asistencia, que operan en los límites de la legalidad, son no obstante actores claves en el campo jurídico. Nos centramos en las oficinas locales de Atención al Ciudadano, y nos fijamos en los asistentes como trabajadores en los límites, a través de programas que forman a los voluntarios para ser orientadores laborales; y los asesores pagados que habitan espacios en los márgenes de la profesión. Examinamos las prácticas sociales de estos asesores, las formas en que el trabajo jurídico se convierte en trabajo de interpretación y el trabajo de asesoramiento se convierte en un proceso de coproducción entre asesor y cliente. Para concluir, reflexionamos sobre cuán lejos se puede llegar en el campo jurídico con recursos limitados, y sobre qué sucede cuando ya no sirve la interpretación de los tecnicismos legales. La interpretación viene a significar que los asesores recurren a su papel de activistas y adoptan tácticas políticas. DOWNLOAD THIS PAPER FROM SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=3067359

Regulation is a central role of states as they seek to protect citizens from the consequences of global markets and unfettered competition. However, in recent years regulation has become a key target of the anti-statist, anti-expert political mobilisations witnessed, for example, in the discourse around the UK exiting the European Union. This chapter draws on understandings developed in the course of a programme of research that drew on the experiences and expertise of communities at the margins in order to re-imagine regulatory systems and practices. We explore the current state of regulation scholarship and practice arguing that much regulation creates relatively closed circuits of regulators, companies and other technocratic intermediaries, generally excluding citizens. We then interrogate four themes that emerged in the research programme: expertise, experience, deliberation and creativity that arise, outlining strategies used to foster a collaborative approach. We conclude by arguing for the reimagination of politics as an integral element of any attempt to ‘reimagine the state'. This requires developing and maintain infrastructure that can support the emergence of expertise by experience, enable community-level understandings of social justice to come to the fore, and allow space for difference.

Voluntary sector advice agencies play, for many in the UK, a key role in accessing and understanding public services. As such, whilst fiercely ‘independent’, their relationship to the welfare state is a complex and conflicted one. Presenting data from participant observation, interviews and focus groups with advisers and managers within the Citizens Advice Service, this paper explores this relationship by focusing on two particular areas of the service; the voluntary provision of advice, and the different funding streams that enable this provision. The paper draws upon assemblage theory, focusing as it does upon elements of an organisation in their ongoing practices and relationships; a processual approach that allows us to reflect upon the broader implications of our ethnographic data. Whilst this approach was motivated by our interest in how the Citizens Advice service endures, we conclude by reflecting upon the ‘fragile futures’ of advice in the context of aggressive budget cuts and the welfare reform agenda.

Increasingly people in the UK are turning to voluntary sector advice organisations for help and support in dealing with everyday problems. Here we argue that advice organisations, who work in the borderlands of law, are nevertheless key players in legal arenas, focusing on local Citizens Advice offices supporting clients with employment problems. We look at the making of advisers as border-workers through programmes which turn volunteers into employment advisers; and the paid advisers who inhabit spaces on the edges of the profession. We examine the social practices of these advisers, the ways in which law-work becomes translation and advice-work becomes a process of co-production between adviser and client. In concluding, we consider how far into the legal arena it is possible to go with limited resources; and what happens when translating the technicalities of law no longer works. Translation comes to mean advisers turning to their activist-selves and adopting political tactics.

This introduction to the special issue on Working the Boundaries of Law provides a context for the papers collected here. It locates the papers in a colloquium held in Oñati to discuss issues around this theme. It traces the significance of borders and boundaries as sites of social practice and considers how the boundaries of law are constructed and contested. The introduction then explores the sorts of practices – or labour – that go on at these boundaries – to maintain, challenge and traverse them. It points in particular to boundaries as sites of translation and emotional labour. Finally, it briefly introduces the papers that follow.

This chapter is concerned with access to justice for workers against the backdrop of cuts to legal aid, the imposition of employment tribunal (ET) fees and other recent amendments to the already complex, restrictive and highly technical labour law framework. The financial crisis and resulting austerity measures have been cited by the Coalition Government as justification for these changes but we argue that their effect has been far more extensive and damaging than would be proportionate even in response to the deepest structural recession. In the chapter we use case studies from a two-year multi-site research project, ‘Citizens Advice Bureaux and Employment Disputes’ to provide examples of the impact of the current system on the experiences of a group of claimants to the ET. As some of these personal stories demonstrate, the denial of access to justice for those seeking redress against often powerful and unscrupulous employers can have devastating and long-lasting effects on the lives of individuals and their families. The chapter begins with a consideration of the operation of the labour market, the nature of employment relations and the development of workplace dispute resolution the last fifteen years or so. We argue that the current system does not provide a suitable and effective forum for resolving workplace disputes and that recent government reforms have exacerbated, rather than improved, things for workers who experience unlawful treatment at work such as discrimination, unfair dismissal or non-payment of wages. The net result is likely to be retrenchment of pre-existing inequalities of power between workers and employers which will be felt to such an extent that labour law is in severe danger of losing its democratic function. We conclude by suggesting some alternative approaches by which employment disputes could be resolved or avoided whilst ensuring access to justice.

The UK energy landscape in 2012/13 is at a pivotal point with the launch of the ‘Green Deal’ and other Government policy initiatives particularly designed to encourage energy efficiency and small scale renewable generation in ways not previously seen at the domestic scale. However, green energy policy rarely connects or co-ordinates with community activism. In Bristol, local communityenergy groups were particularly successful in securing grants from the Department for Energy and Climate Change (DECC) at the start of 2012, with the support of two crucial broker organisations – the Centre for Sustainable Energy (CSE) and the Bristol Energy Network (BEN). The City Council has also secured funding from DECC to pilot Green Deal type mechanisms; and European funding for energy initiatives. All of these put the city in a unique position to further develop community engagement in green energy policy at a local level. This report considers the potential for interaction, the (potential) roles of broker organisations and draws on recent experiences for the lessons learnt.The project looked at the following key questions: ‘What structures, processes and practical arrangements best allow brokers to continue to ‘manage up and manage down’? ‘Specifically, in the Bristol context, what are CSE and BEN’s roles in acting as brokers between energy policy frameworks and community energy groups?’ ‘How can BEN harness community energy in ways that continue to both engagecommunities and constructively link with (ideally even shape) complex formal policy initiatives (such as the Green Deal)?’The report contains a number of sections looking at particular areas of community energy from background research, to the particular issues in Bristol, comparisons with other sectors and the future opportunities and challenges for community energy.