In order to give this rather free floating concept of active citizenship analytical power, we have in this volume focused on three of its constituent concepts – those of responsibility, participation and choice. These three concepts have been elaborated in the country-based chapters in this volume, both through analyses of policy texts and through studies of citizen perspectives. Our aim here is to draw out common themes and their implications for the remaking of citizenship. In doing so, we note how each concept is already intrinsically gendered, and how the reworking of participation, responsibility and choice might shift their gendering.

In the sections that follow, we highlight the contested meanings of the concepts; review the main findings on how the concepts have been selectively elaborated and reworked in the evolution of policies; and how they are understood and experienced by citizens themselves. The conclusion explores some of the ways in which the concepts are articulated with each other in specific sites, producing what De Leonardis terms emergent crystallisations, and suggest what the consequences might be, not least in terms of the erasure or displacement of struggles around access to and transformation of citizenship itself. From these conclusions, two themes arise that deserve further exploration for a future agenda on active citizenship: the changing power-knowledge relations between citizens and professionals and the gender dimension of active citizenship. These form the topic of the two future-oriented chapters that follow.

Responsibility

Responsibility, Isin (2008) argues, cannot simply be viewed as something added to citizenship by reforming welfare states; it is already inscribed in liberal conceptions of citizenship. We might extend this argument, pointing to the complex notions of responsibility embedded in the formation of welfare states. Such notions of responsibility are tied to generational, social and gender contracts. For example in the British case, women (as ‘housewives and mothers’) were charged with the familial and reproductive responsibilities necessary for the ‘continuance of the British race and British ideals in the world’ (Beveridge Report 1942: 52), while the responsibility of the state was carefully circumscribed to exclude certain categories of the population. In Germany, Kuhlmann argues that the Bismarckian model of citizenship already embodied strong notions of public responsibility, linked to communitarian values and the expectation that families would subsidise care services.