Scales of participation and multi-scalar citizenship in EU participatory governance

Abstract

The EU still has a democratic deficit and its legitimacy is strongly questioned. This reveals the importance of citizenship and participation in the context of the challenges the EU faces today. The article contributes to the current discussions on the shifting frameworks of participation and citizenship through empirical research into the EU’s participatory governance. It asks how participation is framed in terms of scale and how these scalar framings are used to formulate citizenship in selected projects funded by the EU programmes on citizenship and culture. This microlevel analysis yields new insights into the politics of scale in the EU’s multilevel participatory governance. Frame analysis of the texts produced in these EU projects indicates how the combination of European and local scales is articulated to shape and regulate participation, citizenship and the EU as a community. The article therefore introduces a new concept, Euro-local scale, to make sense of this rehierarchisation of scales in the EU’s participatory governance.