Public Participation in Sustainability-Oriented Research: Fallacies of Inclusiveness and the Ambivalences of Digital and Other Remedies

Dear Colleagues,

In 2015, the United Nations member states adopted the Sustainable Development Goals. Aim of these goals is to provide a blueprint for a more sustainable future by addressing global challenges, such as health, poverty, inequality, hunger or climate change. In the light of the Covid-19 pandemic, many of these challenges are already, or are likely to become, even more severe. By opening itself up wider to societal participation, science is supposed to play a key role in co-developing solutions for the „grand societal challenges” of our times. This “mainstreaming” of public engagement builds upon several decades of proliferation of different approaches to participation in science and technology. These reach from “science shops” created in the 1970s; over “material deliberation” in form of participatory prototyping and “future making” or involvement of stakeholders in transdisciplinary research; to popular concepts of “citizen science” as well as new forms of real-world experimenting, such as “living labs” or “social innovation labs”. Since the 1990s, participation formats relying on the idea of deliberative democracy have also been used and have recently gained new momentum. But while participatory approaches are becoming more widespread, core questions remain unanswered. Most notable is the question of inclusiveness. The UN SDGs, for example, emphasize the principle of “leaving no one behind” and the European Commission (recently) called for setting EU-wide research and innovation missions based on “an inclusive process” involving citizens, multiple economic sectors, policy areas and scientific disciplines. However, practical experiences with participatory methods as well as their academic reflections question the inclusiveness of current approaches. Many have pointed to a common domination by the better educated and more powerful or questioned the extent to which current approaches transcend epistemic authority of organisations or rather restrict participation to more mundane tasks. Some even see participation as an instrument to silence objections and press ahead with chosen paths. These problems are aggravated by societal transformations, for example regarding the functioning of representative democracies against the background of increasing polarisation of social groups, exigencies of digitalisation or the effects of climate change. Maneuvering these challenges seems to call for new participation approaches including, but not limited to, digital ones. However, institutionalising new approaches emerges as the Achilles’ heel of participation. How society will achieve such institutionalisation will determine whether participation develops as (part of) a remedy for present challenges - or, to the contrary, intensifies them.

With these challenges in mind, this special issue aims to shed light on historic, current and potential future architectures of participation in sustainability-oriented research trying to find answers to questions, such as:

• What areas of sustainability do current participation approaches focus on and what specific inclusiveness challenges do they raise?
• What is the role of participation during and after moments of crisis?
• What differences do we see, for example, between interest groups, urban and rural areas, educational background in terms of participation, exclusion and potential remedies?
• What differences do we see between participation formats, e.g. digital and offline approaches?
• What differences do we see between scientific disciplines and other macro, meso and micro structures underpinning participation practises?
• What are the causes of actual and potential exclusions?
• What is the role of representativeness? To what extent can or should current engagement approaches meet such requirements?

We invite both empirical and conceptual contributions to respond to these and other related questions. By identifying inclusiveness challenges, their causes and fallacies as well as ways to address them, this special issue will respond not only to scientific calls for more reflective and critical academic discussions around notions of inclusiveness but also to a timely policy discourse.

Dr. Leonie Dendler
Dr. Annett Schulze
Prof. Dr. Stefan Böschen
Ms. Claudia Göbel
Guest Editors

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• Participation
• Inclusiveness
• Science
• Citizen Science
• Responsible Science
• Innovation