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Epistemic Equity and Justice: the freedom and opportunity to participate as a knowledge receiver, holder, producer and giver

Epistemic equity and justice encompass the production of and access to knowledge. Epistemic equity is necessary to ensure that groups have equal access to knowledge resources.

Epistemic justice demands recognition as a knowledge producer and holder (Fricker 2015), especially in the face of historical and continued misrecognition of marginalised perspectives and knowledge systems (Fricker 2007). Addressing epistemic injustice is essential to challenge power hierarchies around knowledge in participation. Epistemic equity and justice are necessarily reciprocal and communicative in nature. This includes people feeling heard and listened to – widely identified in our analysis as a major deficit in perceived democratic functioning. Epistemic equity and justice imply that diverse forms of knowledge and expression are valued in participation.

Downstream Enablers of Epistemic Equity and Justice in INSPIRE

„ Embedding local and grounded knowledge, through inclusion of lived experience and other forms of knowledge, supports the legitimation of different ways of knowing.

„ Creative and arts-based methods support expression of marginalised knowledge and perspectives, and are themselves political acts (Mkwananzi et al 2021: 2877).

„ Co-production methods recognise the importance of collaborative knowledge creation in participation, leading to more nuanced articulations of complex issues (Higueras et al 2024: 3).