Framing participation – framing citizenship?

Since the so-called participatory turn, participatory governance has been the focus of many studies on citizenship (cf. Barnes & Prior 2009; Cornwall & Coelho 2007). Alongside better decisions, better services and more legitimate governance, participatory projects are said to produce ‘active citizens’ who take part and contribute to their community in various ways (Saurugger 2010; Warren 2009). As the participatory techniques have become the polity norm, the participatory initiatives have come to possess strong discursive power regarding what it means to be an active citizen. It is largely in these participatory projects that our current concept of active citizenship is being (re)defined. However, the participatory projects have been proven to define their purpose, position and goals in significantly different ways (cf. Newman & Clarke 2010). Hence, the subjectivities of the active citizen, crafted in each of these projects, also take different forms. The contingency of the figure of an active citizen in participatory governance has not yet received much attention (see, however Dagnino 2007). This paper aims to illuminate this particular gap in detail. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how the concept of an active citizen is constructed in significantly varying ways in participatory projects with seemingly similar objectives. It analyses nine projects developing ‘expertise-by-experience’ in the Finnish social sector, using framing analysis as its tool (cf. Rein & Schön 1996; van Hulst, Merlijn & Yanow 2016). It examines how different ways to frame the project’s purpose affect their definitions of the properties an active citizen should have. The analysis draws on an interview data from 23 experts-by-experience and 14 professionals developing it. The interview data is complemented by texts from the projects, their funders and their steering organizations. The paper argues that the projects studied use three main frames when positioning themselves in the field of public policy. They perceive their task as either in a therapeutic, economic or democratic frame. These frames, consequently, result in very different definitions of what attributes a participating, active citizen should have. In a therapeutic frame, an exemplary citizen is defined mostly through her (mental) well-being, which is perceivable in a certain manner of comportment. In the economic frame, the active citizen’s value is determined through the usefulness of the information she can produce as an input for service-production or evaluation. Finally, in the democratic frame, the active citizen is defined as a figure of courage, representing the rights and opinions of her unjustly marginalized peers. Finally, the paper discusses what implications these different citizenship constructions might have. It argues that by defining citizenship through certain criteria of comportment or knowledge- possession, the definition can be used to limit some citizens’ possibilities of participation. In consequence, the participatory policies can also have a marginalizing effect, and contribute to the construction of new, vertical dimensions of citizenship.