Paper Short Abstract:

Experts by experience are expected to craft horizontal relations and restore trust in Dutch welfare provision. This paper traces what happens to these promises in the context of decentralized welfare landscapes in which their role is increasingly institutionalized.

Paper Abstract:

Experts by experience are increasingly central to new welfare models in the Netherlands. Experiential expertise gained prominence in the 1970s, in the context of antipsychiatry and client movements, prefiguring futures built on peer support, which reject psychiatry’s narratives of chronicity. Today, experts by experience are called upon in Dutch welfare landscapes to transform top-down, paternalist welfare by crafting horizontal relations. Experts by experience are imagined as capable of connecting with people deemed ‘hard-to-reach’ or ‘care avoidant,’ and of rebuilding a deeply fractured trust between Dutch welfare professionals and citizens. In the context of decentralized welfare landscapes, experts by experience are often framed as a solution to a myriad of social issues. To what extent are experts by experience able to make good on these promises?

In this paper, I analyze the deployment of experts by experience in various organizations throughout the Netherlands. Experts by experience imagine their role as building horizontal relationships through shared experiences with distress and recovery, however, in doing so they are faced with precarity. A ‘recovery house’ run by experts by experience, which offers temporary respite and a place to ‘catch your breath,’ for instance, is faced with increasingly complex questions, such as homelessness or people living in unsafe housing conditions. I conclude that experts by experience, in struggling to fulfil their promises, are deployed as a stopgap for those moments and issues in which the welfare state falls short.