Citizenship Can Be Learned: Participatory Budgeting as a Pedagogical Process

Abstract

Citizenship is only possible insofar as what is public exists as a space of collective construction, of common good. It is the conditions of citizenship that provide the measure of democracy. As Peter Burke reminds us, “Although citizenship need not entail democracy, democracy does entail citizenship; to assert this is to claim that the value of democracy is grounded in citizenship.”¹ This consideration is relevant because insofar as democracy has become an almost universally accepted value, the debates on citizenship, respectively, the difficulties of experiencing citizenship also are expanded. We have examples of these debates, in topics on radicalization and furthering of democracy, especially through a mechanism of direct citizen participation, and on the strengthening of civil society or of the nonstate public sphere.

I think that we cannot propose to be a team that collects demands. For this purpose the community knows how to organize and does it with the mechanisms it has always used. Now, the important thing in this process is actually to arouse the citizens.

—Íria Charão, Coordinator of the Participatory Budgeting in Rio Grande do Sul/Brazil