SEI York’s citizen science research group has expertise in designing, running and evaluating citizen science projects on environmental sustainability topics.
In this episode, Vishal Mehta talks to his colleague, Rachel Pateman from SEI York about citizen science in general and its application in SEI's City Health and Wellbeing Initiative.
SEI York’s citizen science research group has expertise in designing, running and evaluating citizen science projects on environmental sustainability topics.
In this episode, Vishal Mehta talks to his colleague, Rachel Pateman from SEI York about citizen science in general and its application in SEI's City Health and Wellbeing Initiative.
Gokul Chakravarthy 00:00
Welcome to the second episode of The City Health and Wellbeing podcast brought to you by the Stockholm Environment Institute or SEI. My name is Gokul Chakravarthy, and I'm the producer of this podcast. In the first episode Vishal spoke to Steve Cinderby, his colleague at the York, UK office of SEI, and the co-lead of SEI's City Health and Wellbeing Initiative. They set the stage for this season of this podcast by painting the larger picture of the Initiative for us. In this the second episode, we take the conversation forward as Vishal peels this onion further, this time with another colleague of his. Let's join them.
Vishal Mehta 00:59
I'm your host, Vishal Mehta. I'm a senior scientist with the Stockholm Environment Institute, SEI. With the City Health and Wellbeing Initiative, we are interested in unpacking what makes a city a healthy environment where every citizen can have the opportunity to thrive. In this second episode, we talk about the citizen science activities that we engaged with, with Rachel Pateman from SEI's York centre, based at the University of York in the UK. Rachel works on climate change, conservation biology, and citizen science. Welcome, Rachel. Thanks for being here today.
Rachel Pateman 01:38
Thanks, Vishal.
Vishal Mehta 01:39
Rachel, would you like to share something more about yourself with our audience today? Before we get started?
Rachel Pateman 01:44
Sure. So I've been working at SEI at the University of York for the last 10 years. Before that, I did my PhD at the University of York as well. And that was on climate change biology. So looking at how species are responding to climate change. And, in my research, I used a lot of volunteer-collected data, which was really fantastic for answering these questions that we have about how species are responding to these big global changes. And so, actually, in the last 10 years, at SEI, I've been working more on volunteer-collected data or citizen science... so, thinking about how we can engage members of the public in scientific research to answer real world scientific questions.
Vishal Mehta 02:28
So you mentioned volunteer-collected data and citizen science. Is there nuance between those two, as you know, we do a lot of participatory work in all our offices across SEI, and these range from different levels of engagement with the stakeholders, with communities, governments, all our other clients and partners. So, can you distinguish for our audience? You know, what is citizen science? And what is not citizen science?
Rachel Pateman 02:59
Sure. So I think broadly, we can think of citizen science as being the partnering of members of the public with professional scientists or researchers to answer real world scientific questions. But actually, this is a... it's a really broad range of approaches. So there are lots of different types of citizen science. So, there are types of citizen science that we can think of as being what we call contributory. So members of the public are mainly involved in producing data, which is then analysed by professional scientists. And we can think of things like Galaxy Zoo, where people have been involved in processing images. And the results of that are then used by scientists and their research. Or we can think of... like... the the data that I used in my PhD. So particularly in the UK, in the US, we have this really long history of people - volunteers - going out and making records of things like birds, and butterflies. And those records are submitted to scientists who then process that data and use it in their own research. So there are lots and lots of projects like that across a range of topics that which we would call contributory citizen science. And then we have citizen science, which is a bit more allied, I guess, with what we think of as other participatory approaches to research; a bit more allied with participatory action research, where... actually, people are involved in all stages of the research process. So they're involved in defining what the problem is. They're involved in developing the methods that we use, they're then involved in collecting the data, analysing the data and doing something with the results. I guess where the distinction is, from other forms of participatory research is that kind of scientific elements so we're answering a scientific question, rather than that the... the product being an action or a thing that we're producing, although that can be also a byproduct of citizen science. We're thinking about right they're involved in a piece of scientific research.
Gokul Chakravarthy 05:04
Listening to Rachel define citizen science reminded me of something that I had not thought of for more than two decades now. When I was in grad school in the US in the late 90s, there was this screensaver that was making the rounds amongst researchers all across the country. It was invented by the team at the SETI, or SETI project, whose goal was to discover extraterrestrial life on any computer that had this screensaver installed was lending some of its processing power to meet the massive processing demands of that project. A few years later, the word crowdsourcing came into common parlance. And today, crowdfunding is ubiquitous. So I asked Rachel if I was right, and making connections between these and citizen science,
Rachel Pateman 05:57
Yes, yeah... so I think crowdsourcing is often seen as a form of citizen science. And I think where it gets a bit blurry is these projects where the member of the public doesn't necessarily have any active involvement in the project. And... a useful resource is the European Citizen Science Association's principles of citizen science. So they've got these 10 principles of citizen science, which allow you to think about what makes a good citizen science project, but also helps you to think about whether something is citizen science or not. And they speak very clearly about active involvement of the member of the public in the project, and that the participant has gained some benefit from participating, whether... you know, that can just be enjoyment, that can be learning something, you know, all the way through to, you know, something might... that might significantly change the way that you're living your life. But, yeah, I think those projects where there's passive involvement of the public, which might be... like, this kind of distributed computing power, might be seen, perhaps slightly outside of citizen science, but obviously, it is very... kind of, allied approach of some way of engaging the public with science and doing science.
Vishal Mehta 07:29
Thanks, Rachel. As you know, we've been working with two cities through this Initiative. There's Nakuru in Kenya and Udon Thani in Thailand. I was wondering if we can hear from you about the different kinds of citizen science activities that we engaged in, over the last few years in Nakuru and, if you can, contrast it with Udon. Yeah, sure... Rachel, I remember I was involved in some of these. In particular, I was also interested in drawing out the differences between different neighbourhoods in the inner city. So for example, the problem definition for different neighbourhoods, I would imagine, in any city in the world, could be quite different depending on... you know, the... the cultural makeup, the economic makeup of that neighbourhood, whether it's new, whether it's old, whether it has good services for electricity, water, sanitation, waste management. So, I'm sure that we encountered these types of issues in the different neighbourhoods in Nakuru would you like to describe some of them?
Rachel Pateman 07:54
Sure. So I guess the work that I was mainly involved in was on the co-created citizen science projects that we worked on in those cities. And, like I say, co-creation is... is a form of citizen science, where the communities that we're working with, the members of the public are involved in all stages of the research. So, we did co-created projects in both Nakuru and in Udon. And I can talk through a little bit about the process that we followed in Nakuru and the activities that we did there. Sure. So, our research in Nakuru, or our projects in Nakuru focused... actually, really on the more deprived neighbourhoods in the city. So, we went through a process with the... with the community of working together with them and the community partner that we worked with the Umande Trust who'd worked with that community a lot in the past. And actually, that... you know, that's something to really reflect on is is how that community partner really opened up access to that community for us as researchers coming in from the outside. So we arranged a series of workshops with that community where we asked them to think about what are the issues that are affecting your wellbeing? What are the issues that you would like to tackle and that you think we might be able to help you with, by going through a process of collecting some data about those issues. So, we had it, like I say, we had a series of workshops, and we allow people to express a range of opinions about what they felt their priorities were in terms of issues that affected their wellbeing. They were quite wide ranging. So, things around waste management, water management, flooding, etc, came up repeatedly, as well as some issues around things like stray animals and antisocial behaviour. But actually, our reflection was that these were all kind of interconnected issues. So, the lack of service provision in these neighbourhoods; actually, the issues that they have around water management and flooding are a result of poor waste management often. So what we, kind of, recognised with... with the community was... was they're talking about all these different issues, but actually, they're really interconnected. And they are all feeding into each other. And they all come from the root cause of there being poor service provision in this particular neighbourhood. So actually, what we decided with the community through this kind of iterative process of getting them to think through these participatory activities that we arranged, getting them to think about what the issues were, talking to their other community members about these issues, and then voting and ranking on what they thought the most important ones were, we came to the conclusion that actually all these issues are interconnected and what we should do is try and map them all. And that's what the focus of the project was, in the end... this kind of mapping of these environmental issues that people were felt were impacting their wellbeing in their neighbourhood. But like you say, if we'd have done this project in a... in a high income neighbourhood, or middle income neighbourhood, we would have probably identified much different issues to the ones that we did in... in this low income neighbourhood that we worked in.
Vishal Mehta 12:21
Right, Rachel, I was also wondering, how was the interaction with the local municipality and government? Because I know that this work really engaged the community, made them feel like they had some say, and some understanding of their own situation. But in what ways did we try to bring it to the level of government and services and how do you genuinely think that this kind of work could lead to change and improved services for communities?
Rachel Pateman 12:59
Yeah, so I think the first thing that we did was we had meetings with the people from the local authority from different departments, and we told them about the project and what we were hoping to do. So we went through this period of sensitization where we told them about what our plans were. And then at the end of the project, we shared the results with them. I think if we were doing this again, and we had more time and resource, we would have probably tried to engage those people - people that could use the data and do something with it - more deeply throughout the project. Because, I think one of the challenges we have with citizen science often is that we can produce this data, and then maybe nothing happens with it. And I don't think that was necessarily the case in this project but the... the more deeply, you engage an end user of that data throughout the project, the more likely they are to be receptive to the results of that project, the more likely you are to be able to tailor the data that you're collecting to their needs as well as the needs of the community. You know... there were constraints within this project, it was a pilot project, we didn't have a huge amount of time, we didn't have a huge amount of resource. So we did the best with with the with the resources that we had. And we did have some good outcomes in the end in terms of sharing that data with the... with the authority. But I think ideally, you would have that deeper engagement, like you say, with somebody that can actually do something and bring about some change as a result of the project.
Vishal Mehta 14:43
Right. Rachel. I was just wondering, you know, before this podcast, I was doing some thinking, and I've had a thought for a while about whether these types of citizen science activities can be embedded in the... kind of, organizational structure, institutionalised and be part of just everyday governance and management of a city. Do you see that as possible? And do you have any examples of where something like this has been done? I know that there's some work in... right there in New York that's going on that's doing this, right?
Rachel Pateman 15:22
I think there are examples and... but, I think, say, in the Global North, we've had a lot much longer history of using citizen science than in the Global South. There's been a huge amount of work that's gone on in North America, for example, working with the government to explore how the government can use citizen science data. Same in Europe; there's a huge amount of work and resource that's gone into working with policymakers and demonstrating to policymakers how reliable citizen science data is, and how it can be really used to, not just generate data that decision makers can be used, but really to bring to the fore, what that... what their citizens feel, and is important to them, and to bring in their perspectives to decision making. And we know that if the perspectives of citizens are brought into that decision making those decisions will be better for the citizens, and any decisions that are made are more likely to be accepted by citizens. So, like I say, I think a huge amount of work has gone into a lot of regions in the Global North to really get policymakers to trust citizen science data. And I think we're at the start of that process in the Global South. And, so I think that our... and we probably faced more challenges, just because that experience with citizen science is not there yet for policymakers. And it's a different way of thinking about generating data and engaging with citizens that perhaps policymakers aren't familiar or comfortable with. And we've got to kind of go along that journey of... of... yeah, getting that trust, I guess, in the process.
Vishal Mehta 17:16
Right. Going back to Nakuru, Rachel, what were the main findings, I think you touched upon some of them. But I was wondering if there were some highlights that really stand out for you in terms of findings for these different neighbourhoods from the citizen science activities. And also, if you were able to reflect back once it was done on some of the advantages and limitations of those activities.
Rachel Pateman 17:44
So I'm, like I say we had this process where we engaged with the community in deciding on what the the topic of the project was. And our next step was to then engage them in deciding on what the methodology would be for collecting the data. And that, again, was an iterative process with the research team going away, and drafting some suggestions, which then they shared with the community, who then refined them. This research team then went away, produced a final version of the survey that was then piloted by the community. And then, based on those pilots, it was then refined, and when we kind of came up with the final version. So the final version was was a survey that was designed on a platform called EPI Collect, which is a platform that's available for anybody to use to develop their own citizen science survey. And so for hours, what we were asking members of the community to do was to use a tablet, which we, as SEI researchers, provided to them. They went around the community and walked particular routes, and they took photos of things that they thought were issues. So, often that was an example of a piece of infrastructure that was broken, or some waste that was causing a problem. They took a photo of it, they recorded the the kind of... type of problem that it was, they recorded, whether... whether it had been reported previously, and who had been reported to, and whether anything had been done about it. And so, actually, that was the kind of critical thing that came out of it at the end. So when we shared the data... when the community shared the data with the... with the authority at the end of the project, what they felt they really got out of it was that their problem problems had been heard by the authority which was fantastic. And they felt like... "right! these problems and now on the map; the authority can see what we're what we're dealing with day to day". But also the authority could see... "well, actually where you've been reporting these problems to is probably not the most appropriate place." So, they were then able to share with the community... "actually, if it's this type of problem. Is this this authority, this authority or this service provider who the problems should be reported to". And that led to the community saying, "actually, now, we know who to report to. And we know that actually, that will speed up how quickly these problems are dealt with." So the community felt like that was a real benefit of the project, that that had been clarified and that led to these issues being dealt with more promptly.
Vishal Mehta 20:26
I was just remembering this part of the project that I was also engaged in and thinking that this is exactly an example of an activity that could actually be institutionalised and be part of the municipalities' way of doing things, and could be related to, you know, monitoring of their systems. It could be related to, you know, performance metrics for the utility itself, in terms of how efficient they are, how quick they are at responding. Plus, it could help them also know where the problems are across the city, in the first place.
Rachel Pateman 21:08
Exactly. And it all, you know, if we think about the Sustainable Development Goals, it takes a lot of those boxes as well, you know, thinking about whether people are engaged in decision making in cities, how pleased people are with the services that are provided to them. There are lots of ways that this kind of engagement in... in data production, and feeding that into the decisions that are made within cities can tick a lot of those targets within the Sustainable Development Goals as well.
Vishal Mehta 21:36
Right.
Rachel Pateman 21:37
So I think... you know, building on that. Another thing that came out of the project was just a raised awareness amongst the community about environmental issues, and the impact that they can have on their health and wellbeing. And people from the community reported that they shared that with other members of the community who weren't involved in the project. And again, that... that's, you know, ticking another Sustainable Development Goal box in terms of raising awareness of and increasing education of environmental and sustainability issues. So, there's lots of different ways that citizen science can be of benefit to all different partners involved. And I think that's... you know, it's a really crucial thing when we're thinking about what is citizen science. We need to think about what is the benefit to the participants and what is the benefit to the researcher. And what is the benefit, potentially, to another organisation that might... might do something with that data that's not not a scientific output. And I think if you can tick those boxes for all of those, then you've got a good citizen science project.
Vishal Mehta 22:46
Right! I mean... my next thought I had was something I asked Steve in the first episode - Steve Cinderby - of this podcast. And the question is, what do you think is going to happen in these cities that we worked in once the project is done? Do you think that Umande Trust - the local NGO - or some other local partners will be able to pick it up and adapt it and... and run with it?
Rachel Pateman 23:13
I think resourcing is always a real challenge. And, we often find this in citizen science, that you are funded to do a project. And that funding comes to an end. And then what do you do? And that can be a real, real challenge. I think... like I was talking about earlier, you know, you can do so much with the resource that you have available. But actually... you know, citizen science is pretty resource-intensive. I think it's often seen as kind of a cheap way of collecting data... which in some cases, it might be when you've got these kind of mass participation projects where you're asking lots and lots of people to go out and collect a small amount of data that, you know, scientists would have no way of doing on their own. And the scientists can then sit in their office and process that data. That... that is potentially a... you know, a cost-saving way of collecting data. But, actually, when you're doing this in-depth stuff with communities, you need to support them. You need to be constantly communicating with them, giving them feedback, checking they're on track, giving them reassurance, answering their problems. So that... that requires a lot of resource in terms of time and people. And... so, for something to be ongoing in the long term, I think it would need to be funded by the people and supported by the people that are going to use that data, which in a case like this would be the local authority, you know, it wouldn't be possible for the Umande Trust which does not have very much resource. It wouldn't be feasible for as SEI to continue supporting, like... something like that in the long term. So, it's about raising that awareness of... like, this is a valuable way of collecting data and understanding the... the problems that your citizens are experiencing, and their priorities, and for the... the authority then to invest in supporting that as an activity.
Vishal Mehta 25:19
Right. So Rachel, just on that point, do you think that we at SEI should think about putting some effort into advocating for the institutionalisation of these methods into government institutions?
Rachel Pateman 25:33
Yeah... and I think what's been particularly effective in North America and in Europe, Australia, has been the citizen science associations which exist in those places. So the European Citizen Science Association, Citizen Science Association in North America, because they bring together people who are working on... so, doing citizen science, researching citizen science, and they bring together those people to build expertise, but also to do that kind of lobbying of government, and other decision makers and uses of data, to demonstrate to them... actually, how this can be useful and to kind of... show the expertise that exists and to build that expertise. And so, I think in places like Asia and in Africa, there are these very new Citizen Science Associations, which could potentially fill that role. And I think... I think, for me, it's up to us to kind of support those associations, because I see them as being really critical in... in making those kind of advances in terms of increasing the acceptability of the method.
Vishal Mehta 26:51
Excellent. And what about contrast with Udon Thani in terms of findings because culture is different; a different country. We are going to have another episode that focuses on Udon Thani but I was wondering if you could give us the... the key messages in terms of how it worked in the two places... in terms of whether it was more successful in one place and less so in the other. And any other sort of highlights you can think of?
Rachel Pateman 27:22
Sure. So, we follow the same process in the two cities. And... I'd say we would probably... we probably had an easier time in Nakuru and probably there were more tangible outcomes and impacts of the project in Nakuru than there were in Udon. It's... it's difficult to say whether that's a cultural thing. I think, part of the problem that we had, was that we were working in Udon, which is quite a long way from Bangkok, where our SEI colleagues are based. And so, we didn't probably have as regular contact with the communities in Udon, as we did in Nakuru. And we also didn't have a... we had a consultant who was based in Udon, who helped us with interacting with the community. But we didn't have this kind of existing, trusted community partner that we did in Nakuru that the community already knew, and already had a relationship with. And so I think the problem... or the challenges that we had in Udon, were rooted in just not really being able to build up a relationship and a rapport with the communities. And I think that... that comes back to this issue that we just probably weren't there enough to do that. And, you know, that's... that's No, nobody's fault. It was just, you know, the resources that we had. And we did the best with with what we had available to us. But I think that just emphasises this point, that actually doing this kind of co-created, citizen science is really resource intensive. And you do need to have this regular contact with communities and build up this... this trusted relationship with them. The result of that was that they were less engaged and enthusiastic about the project, which meant that they were less, really willing to go out and do loads of data collection. So we did do... the project was focused around waste and they did go out and they did this waste mapping. So it ended up being reasonably similar to what we did in Nakuru in terms of the topic. And they ended up with this... this.... this map of the of the waste issues in the community. But there were less kind of tangible outcomes from that. I think the other problem that we had in Udon was that, actually, when we went through that process that I spoke about in Nakuru of, how we chose the topic that we would focus on, the topics that they were they were saying were most important to them were things that we didn't feel like we had the expertise to actually lead a project on, or facilitate a project on. So it was things about the safety of the electrical wiring, and... like, dog fouling, and stray cats and dogs and things like that. So these were coming out as the issues that were most important to them. But we felt, "gosh! we don't have the expertise to facilitate a project on that". So we ended up doing something on their kind of third priority, which was waste. And again, that probably meant that they were less engaged with it, because it wasn't their thing that they'd said was the thing that was most important to them.
Vishal Mehta 30:32
And I think one of the other drivers of these differences is probably just that Udon is... is in a better socio-economic state than... than Nakuru; the communities we worked in. So the kinds of problems were probably not as severe. In terms of
Rachel Pateman 30:52
Yes... yeah. So Diane... if it's Diane that you're speaking to in SEI Asia, when she... when she comes on, she'll reflect on some of this because she was more deeply engaged with it than I was. But I know she's reflected to me that, maybe we did things the wrong way around. So, we went and we said, we've got this method that we want to use; it's citizen science. Can you tell us a topic that we could do a citizen science project on? And her feeling was... "actually, should we have thought about the topic first?" And then said, "right! Who can we engage with who's interested in that project and selected a community or a group that was already working on that project... or interested in that topic?" And then thought about... "right! What's the best method to tackle this?" Or the approach could be you go to a community, you say, "what are the topics that are affecting you?" And then we design a project, and think about the methods based on that. So, there are obviously lots of different starting points to these projects. And there are lots of different starting points to doing a co-created systems science project. You know, often it's not the researchers that go to the community and say, "let's do a co-created citizen science project." Actually, often it's the community that say, to researchers, "we've got this problem, can you help us?" And the researchers will then help them do some... some... some data collection, some... you know, some science to tackle that. So, it's thinking about what that starting point is. And I think in Udon, it just highlighted that, maybe, it wasn't quite the right starting point.
Vishal Mehta 32:34
I remember at the beginning, when I was involved in some of the earlier discussions, we were thinking about working in schools in Udon Thani on a water quality monitoring, sort of, effort, which we didn't follow up with, for various reasons. But, what you're pointing out reminds me that, with the co-created version of citizen science, we don't really know what's emerging beforehand. And so, that adds a particular wrinkle, which makes this very distinct from other science and research methods.
Rachel Pateman 33:15
Yeah. And I think, you know, what we found and what other people have found in these types of projects, that that can be a very uncomfortable experience for everybody involved. So it can be uncomfortable for people funding projects, because a lot of people don't want to fund projects that they don't know what the outcome is going to be. It's very difficult, often, to write a funding proposal to get money for a project where you say, "well, we're just going to go and engage with the community and what comes out is what what they're... what they're interested in doing." It can be uncomfortable for researchers to give up some of the power. So you know, what people often say about co-created citizen science is that the power dynamics change. And what you want really, is for that power to be equally distributed between all partners. It's not the scientists who are leading it and the participants are, you know, doing what the scientists are asking of them. It should be, "everybody's voice is equal!" But equally, that can be very uncomfortable for the participants - the community members - because they're thinking, "well, you're the scientists, you... you know, what's, what...
Vishal Mehta 33:26
... yeah, "you tell us what to do."
Rachel Pateman 34:24
"You tell us what to do?" They're used to that power dynamic of being... doing what they're being asked to do. And... and, that's why I think it comes back to this point of allowing time and resource to build up those relationships because that transfer of power won't happen quickly. It needs to happen over a long time, after you've built up these... these relationships with people and you've got that trust. So, I think you know that... that's... that's why we wanted to do these projects. We wanted to test out whether it works. We wanted to know what the challenges were. We wanted to know what the successes were. And, we wanted to share that with the wider community of people doing citizen science because we want to be able to share our experiences. And, actually, you know, other people are having these other challenges with doing citizen science. And so... in particular, co-created systems science, and it's about building that body of evidence of... right, what works, what doesn't work, so that when somebody else is going to do one of these projects in the future, they can learn from what we've done, and the lessons that we've... we've come out with from... from these pilot projects that we've done.
Vishal Mehta 35:41
Right. Well, Rachel, I know that your kids are coming back home soon. I think that before we call this episode done, I guess I wanted to just ask you if there's any other highlights that you would like to share with our audience, before we say bye.
Rachel Pateman 35:59
I think a highlight has been, particularly in Nakuru, the enthusiasm that was shown by... by the community members that we were working with, to really deeply engaged with what we were doing. And, you know, that's... as a researcher working in those... those... within those projects, I think that's the best thing you can hope for sometimes is, or... or, it's very nice outcome is... is you know, seeing that people are invested and feel like what this is worthwhile and feeling enthusiastic about it. And.... and yeah, and for us, I think that... that's a real positive.
Vishal Mehta 36:49
Thanks, Rachel. Thanks a lot.
Rachel Pateman 36:51
Yeah, thank you. I enjoyed that.
Vishal Mehta 36:53
Thank you for being with us for episode two of this podcast on City Health and Wellbeing. I look forward to seeing you again for episode three. Thank you. Bye. SEI is an international nonprofit that works in several countries at the intersection of science policy. You can find out more about us at www.sei.org