Abstract
Abstract ‘Citizen sensing’, grassroots-driven environmental monitoring, could revolutionize environmental risk governance and decision-making. Yet, citizen sensing is far from being accepted by governmental authorities. This contribution explores the environmental law doctrine and legislation for a possible legal basis on which the ‘sensing citizens’ could perform their actions. I argue that the practice, by nature, voices the citizen’s claims to have access to (accurate) environmental information. I defend that citizen sensing is a legitimate manifestation of ‘rights in action’ that can enhance the respect of human environmental rights and promote their enforcement. This study demonstrates how, from the Aarhus Convention framework, an obligation for competent authorities to ‘listen’ to the sensing citizens might even be constructed in case of institutional informational gaps and failures.
Highlights
Adopting primarily a European focus, I inquire: “Can the Aarhus Convention framework form an obligation for the state to listen to the citizen-generated information, when filling environmental information gaps?”
3.1 An Introduction to the Right, the Aarhus Convention A right that could be conceived as ‘mobilized’ by citizen sensing practices is the right to access environmental information, which establishes the entitlement that each individual has to gain access to environmental information held by the competent authorities
Gabrys wondered “How do citizen sensing practices work towards alternative ways of evidencing harm? [...] And what new speculative practices emerge [...]?”71 This article answered the underlying question on how to legitimize such “alternative ways of evidencing harm” and how citizen-led forms of environmental monitoring reflects and even enhances existing rights under the Aarhus framework
Summary
I had the opportunity to observe how individuals and communities were responding to an environmental risk to their own health, coming up with. Whereas studies on broader citizen science and on citizen sensing (which is considered a sub-set of the citizen science phenomenon)[6] often focus on the learning gains for the participants, my contribution explores the legally binding dimension potentially implied by the act of civic monitoring Adopting primarily a European focus, I inquire: “Can the Aarhus Convention framework form an obligation for the state to listen to the citizen-generated information, when filling environmental information gaps?” In answering to this question, this article follows a two-steps approach. The following discussion does not aim by any means to be an exhaustive analysis of the development and status of the rights, concepts and legislative frameworks at issue, but rather an analysis of their relevance for citizen sensing
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