1.2.2 Critiques of citizen science
Citizen science partnerships have the potential to enable the highest levels of participation (as depicted earlier in Figure 2). The aim is to engage citizens with climate science in order to co-produce evidence that will lead to action and the co-design of climate change policies. It is worth noting that this is not always the case. Many citizen science projects involve the public in collecting and analysing data, rather than determining the project focus and selecting research methods. As such, citizen science has been criticised for perpetuating existing power relations and not democratising science, thereby limiting the opportunity for communities whose voices are typically not heard to influence the direction of scientific investigation.
Kythreotis et al. (2019) suggest that the potential of citizen science to involve citizens in policy-making has not been fully exploited and argue that ‘more work is needed to further integrate citizen action and climate policy-making’. They propose a form of ‘citizen social science’ (CSS) that could see the techniques of citizen science (CS) being applied in a more democratic and policy-focused way. They explain that:
CSS embraces the principles of a ‘Two-Eyed Seeing’ approach in an Indigenous and scientific knowledge systems context; where a co-learning journey (where citizens take a lead, often over government/policymakers, in making decisions about how best to formulate policy) is encouraged for more transdisciplinary research and to bring together different ways of knowing. (Bartlett et al., 2012)
They argue that where citizens are ‘catalysts and drivers of climate policy transformation’ (p.4) it is more likely that overlooked environmental stressors will be addressed, thereby widening the climate science evidence base and increasing understanding.