Lived citizenship as the locus of political agency in participatory policy

Abstract

Participatory policies seeking to foster active citizenship continue to be dominated by a territorial imagination. Yet, the world where people identify and perform as citizens is spatially multifarious. This article engages with the tension between territorially grounded perceptions and relational modes of practicing political agency. Studying empirically the Finnish child and youth policies, we address jointly the participatory obligations that municipalities strive to fulfill, and the spatial attachments that children and young people establish in their lived worlds. To this end, we introduce the concept of lived citizenship as an interface where the territorially-bound public administration and the plurality of spatial attachments characteristic to transnational living may meet. We conclude by proposing a re-grounding of lived citizenship in both topological and topographical terms as an improvement in theoretical understanding of mundane political agency and as a step towards more proficient participatory policies.

Keywords::

• lived citizenship
• topology
• topography
• participation
• political agency
• public administration
• child and youth policy

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the editors and the two anonymous referees for their engaged and helpful comments and suggestions. Special thanks to Elina Stenvall for participating in the ethnographic fieldwork.

Notes

^1. For a detailed account on the national system, please visit our previous publications.

^2. The platforms represent different scalar dimension, namely ‘The World,’ ‘The Continent,’ ‘The Nation,’ ‘The Region,’ ‘The City,’ and ‘The School Neighborhood.’ The concept of scale is used throughout the article in the political geographical sense, and not with reference to cartography.

^3. Income differentials in Finland are smaller than the European average. In 2010, the average income of the highest-income decile was 5.3-fold that of the lowest-income decile and Gini index 25.8 (European average 30.7), while in the countries with the highest income differentials the highest-income decile was more than tenfold. The ‘middle-class childhoods’ we studied can hence be outlined as ‘normal childhoods’.

^4. For all Finnish acts and decrees mentioned in this article, translations can be found at the Finlex Data Bank (http://www.finlex.fi/en/laki/kaannokset/).

^5. Schooling is strongly state-promoted in Finland by free education, broad network of public institutes, and various subsidies. From kindergarten to senior high and vocational schools, most of the population is involved in pedagogical institutions.

^6. The comparative EU Kids Online study has made explicit that Finnish children's use and exposure to virtual media is of high level. Seventy-nine percent of Finnish children use the internet daily (European average 60%), with an average of 95 minutes online time (European average 88 minutes) (Haddon, Livingstone, and the EU Kids Online Network 2012).

^7. Captions coded as (city/expert). All translations by the authors.

^8. The expert interviews were conducted prior to the ethnographic study. The posed questions did not indicate in any way our presumptions concerning the matter, i.e. the interpretations are entirely their own.

^9. Most importantly Netari that brings youth workers to social media environments, and Aloitekanava that provides children and youth opportunities to introduce bill's to their local government.

Additional information

Funding

We also wish to thank the Academy of Finland for financially supporting this work [grant number SA258341], [grant number SA 134949], [grant number SA 253845]; the Space and Political Agency Research Group (SPARG) at the University of Tampere for an inspiring research environment.