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Short Abstract

Citizen science is increasing enabling deeper form of public engagement. This presentation reviews co-created environmental initiatives, assessing their alignment with principles of high-quality knowledge co-production (Norström et al 2020) such as pluralism and goal-orientation.

Abstract

Citizen science initiatives have proliferated during the last decades as researchers and policy actors have discovered the need and benefits of increased public engagement. Typical citizen science data consists of citizen observations (e.g. bird species) that help to strengthen the scientific evidence-base underlying policy and management decisions. Increasingly, there are calls for more inclusive and deeper engagement with citizens, including joint problem framing, participation in research design, data analysis, testing and evaluation as well as dissemination and public engagement. In this way, citizen science becomes a form of knowledge co-production.

In this presentation, we present preliminary insights from an ongoing literature review addressing co-created citizen science. We analyse the ways in which citizen science initiatives on environmental questions have—or have not—functioned as knowledge coproduction processes and engaged citizens in interaction which scientists to jointly study environmental changes and the ways to combat sustainability challenges. We also examine how these cases fare measured by the principles for high quality knowledge co-production (Norström et al. 2020), that emphasize context-specificity, pluralism, goal-orientedness and interactivity.