Scales of Participation and Conceptualisations of Citizenship in EU Projects

Participation – a central dimension of citizenship – has become a popular concept. At different levels of administration it has been seen as a solution for a variety of problems. In the European Union, one way of increasing participation are the EU-programmes through which funding is distributed for citizens’ co-operation across the member states in different fields. In this paper, I am interested in participation at the level of individual projects funded by the EU-programmes regarding citizenship and culture. As this kind of civic engagement may blur the boundary between democratic influence and governance, the democratic implications of participation will be evaluated. The purpose of the paper is to analyse how participation is debated in materials produced within these projects. The variety of meanings given to participation indicates how contested participation is as a concept and as participatory practices. It also reflects the complexity of citizenship in general and Union citizenship as a conceptual change and a political innovation. The central question of the paper is how the several territorial scales involved in EU-projects form participation and citizenship. This may shed light to the more general trend of participation becoming attached to various territorial and administrative layers due to multilevel and complex governance and many other international and sub-national transformation processes which change the contexts of citizenship.