Data annex for the Descriptive, Text and Network Analyses

It inquires ‘which factors contribute to the policy uptake of community-led citizen sensing, responding to a risk and eventually generated by distrust, and which interventions are needed for citizen sensing to complement institutional risk governance’. This complementary potential is assessed by empirically researching the policy uptake of citizen sensing and the influence of factors such as the technology element, the grassroots’ drive, the risk element, distrust and social uptake on this outcome.

A number of case studies are investigated adopting a combination of methods, including ethnographical research (on two selected cases), descriptive analysis and fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (on a larger set of cases). The cases are analysed through a theoretical framework built on legal, socio-political and Science and Technology Studies’ scholarship on risk governance, environmental justice, co-production and the role of non-expert knowledge in society.

From the analysis, a framework for integrating citizen sensing into institutional risk governance is drawn, envisaging various levels of integration and targeting possible inhibitors and challenges to the integrative process. The main findings include the essential role of risk and sound technology for policy uptake; the unexpectedly positive influence of distrust; the need for a legal instrument regulating citizen sensing and including a legitimate base for it, eventually to be grounded in a ‘right to contribute to environmental information’; the identification of a dilemma of integration deriving from the incompatibility of integration with strongly community-led projects.

Issued: 2020-03-24