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Short Abstract

A youth-led citizen science project in the Dutch Peel Region explored how farmers perceive synergies between nature-inclusive and technological farming, showing how participatory co-design can transform 'hard-to-reach' youth into co-creators of sustainability transitions.

Abstract

Youth are often described as a “hard-to-reach” group in citizen science, reflecting a broader framing that scholars have increasingly recognised as locating participation challenges in marginalised populations themselves rather than in institutional conditions (Lightbody, 2017; Wöhrer et al., 2021). This paper examines a youth-led citizen science initiative in the rural Dutch Peel region that sought to reverse this logic by positioning secondary school students as co-designers of an agricultural sustainability study in collaboration with local farmers. Drawing on a reflexive case study approach informed by practitioner-research methodology (Herr & Anderson, 2015), the paper builds on existing epistemic frameworks in citizen science (Kimura & Kinchy, 2016; Ponti et al., 2024; Jaeger et al., 2023) to distinguish between epistemic capacity, epistemic agency, and epistemic development. The case indicates that co-created participation can generate substantial epistemic capacity, yet the translation of this capacity into agency depends on sustained institutional scaffolding beyond moments of co-design. Comparing the Peel trajectory with youth citizen science projects that achieved institutional uptake (Kim et al., 2020; Nolan et al., 2021), the paper argues that participation frameworks effectively describe structures of involvement yet remain largely silent on the institutional conditions required for epistemic agency particularly in peripheral knowledge landscapes where carrying structures for non-institutional knowledge are absent.