Presentation short abstract

A critical look at citizen science in Positive Energy Districts, examining how engagement metrics shape participation, power, and the democratic potential of co-produced data in the heat transition.

Presentation long abstract

Positive Energy Districts (PEDs) have become flagship sites in Europe’s heat transition, promoted as arenas where citizens co-produce data, shape local energy strategies, and participate in low-carbon urban governance. Yet PEDs also concentrate technocratic expertise, digital infrastructures, and investment logics that risk reproducing the power asymmetries driving current socio-ecological crises. Political ecology helps clarify how governance arrangements embed or challenge such inequalities, particularly in relation to knowledge power.

Citizen science (CS) is widely presented as a pathway to democratizing knowledge production. However, its political dimensions (who participates, on what terms, and with what consequences) are often overlooked in favour of outcome-oriented research designs. For CS to function as a democratic space, questions of inclusion, purpose, and power must be treated as central rather than peripheral.

This paper examines how CS and co-production unfold within PEDs and asks: to what extent does citizen science empower participants, and what kinds of engagement metrics capture this? Drawing on the NWO-funded EmPowerEd project, we combine a scoping review of engagement metrics, comparative analysis of PED initiatives, and auto-ethnographic insights from participation in co-creation processes. We show how indicators and data practices can either illuminate exclusions or act as extractive devices that discipline participation and depoliticize conflict.

Empirical findings reveal a fundamental tension: some PEDs use citizen-generated data to challenge planning decisions, while others mobilize CS to legitimize pre-set technological pathways. We argue that participatory metrics can democratize environmental governance only when embedded in reflexive, power-aware, and plural co-production practices.