CONCEPT
Practical Knowledge
The form of expertise — grounded in direct experience and refined through continuous engagement — that affected populations possess and expert governance systematically cannot access; the knowledge gap that Fung's framework identifies as the primary source of expert governance failure.
Practical knowledge is Fung's term for the form of expertise that affected populations possess about their own conditions — knowledge grounded in direct experience and refined through continuous engagement, distinct from the analytical knowledge that external experts can provide. The customer service representative who interacts with a biased AI system possesses knowledge about how the bias manifests in practice that statistical analysis cannot capture. The displaced worker possesses knowledge about the specific experience of displacement that no economic model represents. The teacher observing students' engagement with AI writing tools possesses knowledge about educational implications that no policymaker can replicate. This practical knowledge is not anecdotal — it is expertise in Aristotle's sense of phronesis, and participatory governance processes are designed specifically to access it.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The concept operates as the mechanism that explains why participatory governance produces outcomes superior to expert-only governance. Experts possess technical knowledge that