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Citizen Science for Sustainability - SuScit

Method(s) Used

Name of person who posted the project:

Jonas Egmose Mortensen

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Location of project:

United Kingdom

Date when the project started:

2005

Date when the project ended/project ongoing:

2009

Background to project:

Providing local communities with a greater say in environmental and sustainability research
The Citizens Science for Sustainability (SuScit) Project is a unique attempt to provide local communities with a voice in the future of urban sustainability research.

Funded under the EPSRC?s Sustainable Urban Environment?s Programme, the SuScit Project developed an innovative programme of action research and networking activities designed to promote engagement and dialogue between the EPSRC research community, professional stakeholders and sustainability practitioners, and most importantly local citizens: particularly socially and economically excluded citizens, such as older people, single parents, young people, and those from black, Asian and ethnic minority communities.

Purpose of project:

Developing a Community Led Agenda for Urban Sustainability Research
The challenge for the SuScit project has been to design a ?bottom-up?, public engagement and foresight process which empowers lay citizens in dialogue with scientists, policy makers and professional stakeholders, and which articulates the environmental and sustainability research needs of marginalised and excluded urban communities.
In addressing this challenge we sought to design a participatory process that:

Recognised the inherently contested nature of sustainability, through providing an open and reflexive framing of the problem, and valuing local knowledge and expertise.
Supported lay participants through the use of appropriate facilitation and engagement tools, and by recognising the differing roles and responsibilities of the various participant groups involved.
Worked with and through the local community in order to build trust, promote engagement and maximise the value of the project?s outcomes to all those who participated.

Project activities:

Five Phases of Action Research
The SuScit process comprised a six-month programme of meetings, workshops and group activities, structured around five key phases.

The action research for the SuScit project was run through the local community centre in the Mildmay ward in Islington, North London. Islington is in many ways a vibrant, diverse and densely populated area, but also the sixth most deprived borough in the country facing significant social, economic and environmental challenges. Mildmay is one of the most deprived wards in Islington

The central idea of the programme was to reflexively explore community understandings of, and perceptions and aspirations for, urban sustainability in order to provide a basis for identifying relevant research needs and opportunities. This was reflected in the overall structure of the engagement process whereby local residents initially took the leading role in articulating community perspectives (and researchers and practitioners where encouraged to listen and reflect), whilst in the later phases of the process responsibility shifted to the researchers and practitioners to deliberate and respond to what they had learnt from the local community, by developing a research agenda for urban sustainability which reflected the issues raised.

Project results:

Reports from the project are available for download on the project website www.suscit.org.uk/resources/.

To watch our 10 minute introduction video about the SuScit project, please visit
http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.channel&channelID=486868826

Contact details:

For further information see www.SuScit.org.uk or contact Jonas Egmose Mortensen jonas.mortensen@brunel.ac.uk.
Citizens Science for Sustainability (SuScit) is based at BRESE - Brunel Research in Enterprise, Innovation, Sustainability and Ethics at Brunel University, in collaboration with Capacity Global.
SuScit is an EPSRC funded initiative supported under the Sustainable Urban Environments (SUE) Programme (Grant Ref. EP/C541650/2: Principal Investigator, Prof. Malcolm Eames).

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