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Short abstract:

Theoretical and empirical research on CS for traditional and scientific knowledge dialogue, within the Amazon region's socio-bioeconomy agendas, from a decolonial view. Safeguards, protocols, governance, infrastructures cross issues such as cognitive justice, data sovereignty, and benefit sharing.

Long abstract:

The Amazon region has historically suffered from the predatory exploitation of the forest and violence against traditional communities, resulting in the loss of socio-biodiversity, water pollution, climate imbalance, increased poverty, and social vulnerability. Socio-bioeconomy has been seen as a way of combining nature protection and the well-being of local populations. Strategies in this direction advocate the intersection and collaboration between Research, Development, and Innovation (RD&I), Cultural Heritage and Traditional Knowledge, Public Policies, and Sustainable Businesses.

Citizen science emerges as a methodological strategy that potentially facilitates this collaboration, particularly in the dialogue between traditional knowledge and scientific-technological knowledge, and its results for the formulation of public and private policies. In Latin America, citizen science finds, in turn, a legacy of experimentation and theorization from a decolonial point of view. The meeting of decolonial theses and new agendas for the co-production of knowledge, using platformed digital infrastructures and tools, poses new challenges.

This work presents reflections and learnings, derived from theoretical and empirical research on topics and points of view under debate regarding the articulation between traditional knowledge and scientific knowledge, its possibilities, and limits. It analyzes the particularities of this debate in the context of the socio-biodiversity and socio-bioeconomy agendas, in the Amazonian scenario. This poses the need to face some challenges, such as: legal and ethical safeguards, research and data protocols, governance systems, open and accessible infrastructures, aiming to guarantee cognitive justice, data sovereignty, and benefit sharing.

The potential for social transformation from these citizen science initiatives lies less in the products and services that result from them. It lies above all in the learning derived from the processes of mutual listening between these different actors and the resulting solutions to territorial, social and environmental problems, and needs.