What is the problem?
 

We are presently witnessing an explosion of data-led grassroots citizen science initiatives covering a wide range of pressing environmental issues, such as food security, conservation, air pollution, and climate change. Increasingly, these initiatives take the form of local, bottom-up, community-driven practices that facilitate citizen engagement with scientific tools and data to address real-world problems. Thanks to the internet and modern crowd-sourcing technologies, they are rapidly spreading across the globe, emerging in developed countries and among remote communities living under extreme conditions, such as disaster environments, where human safety is at risk and ecosystems are visibly threatened. As these grassroots networks grow in size, scope, and geographical reach, they potentially reconfigure relations between science and society. By developing innovative ways of assessing environmental risks using their own technologies (e.g., self-assembled air quality monitoring devices), citizens in these networks highlight discrepancies between expert and lay appreciations of risk, initiate contextual learning about their habitats, and involve broader publics in the definition of problems, data collection, and analysis. Using social media and digital tools, they increase pressure on public authorities and scientists to open up science and science policymaking to society. In these ways, they challenge the authority of formal institutions, opting instead for inclusive governance, understood as the participation of all stakeholders in policymaking and knowledge production.

 

What are the project objectives?
 

The research project takes the above observations as its entry points to assess how grassroots citizen scientists in three world regions mobilize new data devices and technologies to tackle environmental threats; and how formal institutions respond to citizen-driven environmental data practices. With concerned stakeholders, it addresses the challenges and pitfalls that emerge in these processes with the aim of developing mutually responsive environmental data governance approaches.

 

Why does this matter for society?

​

While the wide public adoption of mobile technologies could help to facilitate more inclusive and effective science governance, the scientific and societal benefits of citizen engagement with digital technologies cannot, and should not, be assumed. The term “citizen science” elicits mixed appreciations among societal actors. European policymakers who hail citizen science as a means of stimulating public participation in science, expanding opportunities for scientific data collection, and furthering the EU’s policy agenda of Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) typically refer to “contributory citizen science projects” in which amateur volunteers gather data for scientists but do not set the agenda for research and policy. While valuable, these projects tend to exclude citizens’ knowledge of local environments and experiential knowledge. Hence, they do not engage with the full range of possibilities to validate and act on citizen-gathered data.
 

Scientists, in turn express concerns about the scientific quality of data produced by citizens and the value these data have to those who set science policy, as most citizens lack formal scientific training. These sentiments resonate with experts’ concerns about the lack of public understanding of science, which suggests that the general public is unable to make good decisions without scientific input. In response to such concerns, some public authorities (e.g., in the USA) now restrict the collection or use of environmental monitoring data by citizens.

Many citizen scientists voice criticism of institutional science and its links with industry and government, arguing that such connections inhibit knowledge sharing and the development of a true participatory science culture. Whereas contributory citizen science assumes that citizens and scientists co-construct knowledge, grassroots citizen science initiatives emanate within participatory countercultures (e.g., do-it-yourself science) that contest orthodox science and government. Such observations have led critics to argue that policy imperatives to institutionalize grassroots citizen science amount to a “taming” of its policy-critical potential, as citizen science is appropriated into “business-as-usual.”  Conversely, formal institutions may negate grassroots citizen science. To give an example, in Japan today, only a few local governments display citizen-generated radiation data maps.

It is hence unclear how the advent of grassroots citizen science will affect global environmental governance. Garnering insight into this question is urgent, as there are many problems that emerge when communities democratize technology. This study seeks to examine these challenges to strengthen and develop the connections between citizen-driven approaches and institutional imperatives in the governance of environmental problems.

​