Citizen science for climate adaptation governance in cities

Abstract

Climate change poses serious challenges to urban systems and their ability to govern adaptation. The dependence of adaptive capacity of cities on the collective efforts of the public, private and civil society actors highlights the need for exploration of alternative approaches at this interface. This thesis aims to investigate the potential value of one such approach - citizen science - to enhance urban governance capacity for adaptation in the European context. The leading research question was formulated as: How can citizen science contribute to climate adaptation governance in European cities and urban areas? In answering this question, the thesis assessed the impact of nine adaptation related citizen science projects around Europe on the scientific, policy and societal sphere of adaptive governance capacities. To achieve this, two case study analysis and assessment frameworks were developed drawing on an extensive literature review, and used to guide 26 semi-structured interviews and desktop analysis of the grey literature related to the projects. Based on this assessment citizen science for climate adaptation was re-conceptualised and general recommendations for citizen science practice were formulated. The results show that citizen science can significantly contribute to scientific aspects of adaptive governance capacity, while being moderately beneficial to societal aspects and having only low impacts on policy. In the context of urban governance, citizen science was shown to be strong for example in production of credible, salient, useful and usable knowledge, enhancement of science-society interaction or individual empowerment. On the other side, it performed weak in mobilization of private actors, steering of behavioral changes or policy impacts. However, citizen science presents important opportunities for enhancing social capital, preparedness to climate risks, access of institutions to up-to-date knowledge or connecting a diversity of stakeholders. This research concludes that distilling the strengths, addressing the weaknesses and paying attention to unexplored opportunities could make citizen science better fitted to the urban governance contexts thereby increasing the potential to contribute to governance capacity for climate adaptation. More empirical research of citizen science and its proper utilization in climate adaptation would be desired. This research may serve scientists and policy-makers as an inspiration for enriching science-policy interfaces and invites European cities and urban areas to consider such a method of public participation in their future governance mechanisms.