Government policy design is a serious game: Fairness Duties in Participatory Design as a normative framework for democratic epistemology

This paper examines the UK Civil Service’s participatory experiments at the London Design Biennale, framing them not as democratic innovation but as fiduciary–epistemic breaches. Drawing on fiduciary law, deliberative democracy, and epistemic injustice theory, it shows how the workshops—presented as ‘serious games’—functioned as scripted performances of openness, distributing recognition selectively while silencing dissent. I develop the concept of Fairness Duties in Participatory Design, a normative framework grounded in fiduciary law and public law principles of reason-giving, transparency, and proportionality. The analysis demonstrates that without such duties, participatory governance risks devolving into epistemic clientelism and democratic spectacle. DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.36704.34568