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Short abstract:

We investigate the ongoing developments of the GREENGAGE Innovation Action, a governance and policy lab that assembles technology providers, academics, local planning agents and civic innovators to set up ethical collaborative environments for innovating local policy making through citizen science.

Long abstract:

The GREENGAGE Innovation Action (HORIZON 2022) is a governance and policy lab that assembles technology providers, academics, local planning agents and civic innovators to set up ethical collaborative environments for innovating local policy making. Referred to as Observatories, they are envisioned as situated, data-driven, community-led intelligence supporting the European Green Deal. This intelligence is produced within the Academy, a multi-stakeholder interaction platform, public toolbox and knowledge base, and a replicable framework fostering systemic changes beyond GREENGAGE.

The preparation of Observatories began with restructuring project governance to enable experimentation across five pilots and to establish roles for organising transdisciplinary learning within a pan-European innovation ecosystem.

In the upcoming phase, the Academy tests the pilot prototypes by engaging communities through tech-aided citizen science, applied to intermediate between urban and regional planning challenges and the expectations and aspirations on the ground. Situated in interrelated use cases, we explore tensions driven by environmental change, socio-economic inequalities and low civic participation in democratic policy making. By providing different points of access to human and other-than-human (technologies, discourses) participants, we challenge top-down transition policies to become relevant for localised communities and actionable for their authorities. To enhance possibilities for meaningful participation of historically underrepresented groups in policy making, the Academy builds on analogue and digital interaction platforms and invites marginalised people to organise discursive interventions.

Following, we discuss and cluster reflections on the organisation of knowledge co-production and application within the exploratory stage to understand barriers and potentials for transformative learning and governance through GREENGAGE Observatories.