Engaging citizens to boost climate neutrality and greater circularity: opportunities and challenges for research and inn
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Engaging citizens to boost climate neutrality and greater circularity: opportunities and challenges for research and innovation Gerd Schönwälder1 Received: 7 April 2020 / Accepted: 17 July 2020 © Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract The article argues that citizen engagement can reconnect science with society and improve related policymaking. This matters most for the challenges that defy purely technocratic solutions and call for changes in lifestyles and behaviour, the transition to climate neutrality and greater circularity being a prime example. To be effective, citizen engagement has to be inclusive, deliberative and influential; other forms of societal outreach fail this triple test. Participatory action research and citizen science can provide inspiration, as well as tools and techniques. Citizen engagement requires specific entry points—such as research and innovation “missions” or transition “super-labs”—which are most likely to emerge at the intersection between science on the one hand and markets and societies on the other. Policymakers need to design clear, predictable and enduring mechanisms but otherwise not interfere, to ensure that citizen engagement remains authentic and legitimate. “Reaching out” to society and “engaging” citizens has become a new mantra for policymakers. Already well established in some policy fields, such as local government— witness the worldwide spread of participatory budgeting from its modest beginnings in the Brazilian town of Porto Alegre 1—citizen “engagement” or “involvement” 2 has become a touchstone for policymakers elsewhere, including in research and innovation. What is behind this trend? Two drivers in particular come to mind: first, the legitimacy crisis3 afflicting governments, public institutions and policymaking in general has not spared research and innovation. Just like other policymakers, those responsible for devising relevant policies, strategies and funding schemes have to demonstrate that they are responsive to “societal needs and concerns” and take citizens’ views and preferences seriously.
Second, and more to the point, citizen engagement in research and innovation is thought to make the resulting policies more relevant to society and thereby increase their impact.4 Given how long research and innovation was considered a private garden reserved to highly specialized “experts”, their employers in academia and private business, and of course research and innovation policymakers themselves, this is quite a remarkable shift. Yet, many in the science establishment had long realized that excessive specialization, hermetic borders between disciplines and scientific cultures discouraging collaboration across different fields, was detrimental to addressing the most pressing societal challenges—climate change, cancer, social inclusiveness, to name just a few. The resulting emphasis on more interdisciplinary work and on combining approaches from the scientific, technical, engineering and mathematical (STEM) discipl
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