Contributions of Citizen Science to the Sustainable Development Goals: Is Transformative “Global” Citizen Science Possible?

Abstract

Various efforts have been undertaken to encourage citizen science contribution to the United Nations’ (UN’s) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). These attempts are connected chiefly to the measurement of specific sustainability indicators. Using perspectives from critical theories on equity and justice to review the recent literature on employing citizen science for the SDGs, we argue that those advocating that citizen science be used for monitoring and fulfilling global sustainability goals should also be attentive to questions of historically inequitable power relations in the production of knowledge, and they should embrace both decolonial perspectives on science as well as a humbler stance on global data monitoring and governance. While we have argued elsewhere that citizen science should be attentive to various forms of exclusion and epistemic injustice, such attentiveness is even more relevant in the context of attempting to globalize citizen science activities. For this, we draw on alternative forms of citizen science, namely citizen social science and tracking science, and place them within the broader discussion of open science for justice. By pointing to these alternatives, we call for greater appreciation of the varieties of citizen science; for a commitment to a more self-reflexive science that embraces not only community participation and collaboration, but also community self-determination; for the acknowledgement and utilization of multiple knowledge systems to produce life-sustaining knowledge; and an action-oriented approach to science that produces practical and desirable outcomes for human and more-than-human communities.