What does democratic governance look like at the scale of knowledge itself?

We debate how to govern cities, nations, and companies. But what about the governance of knowledge itself — the set of claims that a society treats as authoritative? Who decides which theories get funded, which journals matter, which expertise gets consulted? The current answer is: a combination of peer review, grant committees, editorial boards, and citation networks. It's an emergent, market-like system that produces real outputs but is neither transparent nor democratic. An isolated researcher with a heterodox view has almost no institutional pathway to challenge consensus. A well-funded field with aligned incentives can suppress anomalies for decades. What would genuine democratic governance of knowledge look like? Not "governance by scientists" — that's technocracy — but governance that gives the people affected by scientific claims a voice in how those claims are produced and validated. Is this a coherent idea? Or is expertise inherently incompatible with democracy?