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Paper short abstract

Citizen technoscience in southern Chile is analyzed as an ethnographic practice of co-producing environmental knowledge and data, where heterogeneous actors collaboratively generate monitoring practices that reshape expertise and socioecological futures amid socioenvironmental controversies.

Paper long abstract

This study examines citizen technoscience (CT) as an ethnographic practice of co-producing environmental knowledge in contexts of socioenvironmental controversies, based on research conducted in 2025 in southern Chile, within the CITEC Project (Citizen Technoscience Center for Socio-Environmental Transformation). Through a mapping of monitoring initiatives the study analyzes how local communities, academics, NGOs, and indigenous and territorial organizations generate environmental data and monitoring practices aimed at protecting ecosystems and territorial governance. The article conceptualizes CT not only as a technical tool, but also as a relational practice that reconfigures the boundaries between expert and non-expert knowledge, science and society, and institutional and situated forms of experience. In contexts marked by fragile environmental governance, limited institutional monitoring capacity, and low legitimacy of public policies, these initiatives often produce the only ecological data available, transforming community monitoring into a politically and epistemically significant practice.

The analysis highlights persistent tensions surrounding institutional validation of data, unstable funding, weak inter-institutional coordination, and limited recognition of local and indigenous knowledge in formal regulatory frameworks. These tensions are, as epistemopolitical controversies, reveal the limits of conventional models of environmental governance.

From an ethnographic perspective, we argue that CT constitutes a methodology that challenges traditional and technocratic regimes of knowledge governance, offering anthropology a path toward more inclusive, dialogical, and politically relevant forms of socioecological engagement in times of climate urgency. It seeks to cultivate forms of shared experience based on sustained attention to socioecological relationships, collective experimentation, and deliberative practices, enabling the co-imagination of alternative futures.