CONCEPT
Complementarity Thesis
The empirical claim that expert and practical knowledge produce governance outcomes jointly superior to those produced by either form of knowledge alone — the mechanism that explains why participatory governance improves governance quality.
The complementarity thesis is Fung's formalization of the mechanism through which participatory governance produces superior outcomes. Experts possess technical knowledge affected populations lack; affected populations possess practical knowledge experts lack. The two forms of knowledge are genuinely complementary — neither is substitutable for the other, and the combination produces governance outcomes that neither could generate alone. The thesis provides the empirical foundation for the normative case for participatory governance: the case rests not on democratic principles alone but on evidence that participation improves the actual quality of governance outcomes on criteria (effectiveness, efficiency, adaptability) typically associated with expert governance.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The thesis was demonstrated empirically in Fung's studies of Chicago community policing and Porto Alegre participatory budgeting, where participatory processes produced outcomes — reduced crime, better-targeted infrastructure investment — that expert-only processes had failed to achieve. The mechanism was consistent across cases: practical knowledge about specific local conditions, available only to residents, proved essential to identifying