Where Environmental Citizen Science Meets the Law

• Citizen science often intersects with the legal realm. Communities in different places in the world are demanding environmental justice through civic monitoring (Haklay and Francis 2018) and are pushing for new regulatory standards (Ottinger 2010). Community-based monitoring has been explored in the literature from both the (global and relative) North and South as a creative and constructive response to citizens’ aspiration for justice (Berti Suman 2022; Ahmed et al. 2019; Haklay and Francis 2018). Citizen science broadens the new horizon of environmental justice and flanks traditional environmental (and climate) protest movements (Berti Suman, Schade and Abe 2020). We can identify also a claim to epistemological justice in the systematizing of local knowledge and observations into data that can be used by appointed agencies, in opposition to anecdotal and sporadic evidence (Balazs and Morello-Frosch 2013). Citizen science communities are getting their evidence accepted in court (as the US Formosa case illustrated in Berti Suman and Schade 2021 demonstrates) and are advocating for legitimizing the practice under the Aarhus framework (Berti Suman et al. 2023, in this special issue; Berti Suman 2020). In spite of this, research on the connections between the law, case law, and citizen science is scarce.

Subject headings

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Sociologi (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Sociology (hsv//eng)

HUMANIORA  -- Annan humaniora -- Övrig annan humaniora (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Other Humanities -- Other Humanities not elsewhere specified (hsv//eng)

HUMANIORA  -- Annan humaniora (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Other Humanities (hsv//eng)

Keyword

Citizen Science

Environmental Law

Litigation

Africa

Legal Frameworks

Governance

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

art (subject category)