Engagement and accessibility tools for pro-environmental action on air quality: the SOCIO-BEE paradigm

Abstract

AbstractThe involvement of citizens and all stakeholders is crucial in tackling environmental and social matters. This, addressing equity and diversity issues, although challenging, is a necessary condition for achieving positive outcomes and ensuring that no one is left behind. To help ease this challenge, this work presents a systematic approach to ensure inclusive participation and leverage non-technical and technical elements to maximise stakeholder engagement in scientific activities to successfully address sustainability concerns. For that, it builds on the interim results of the H2020 SOCIO-BEE project, a Citizen science (CS) proposal to reduce air pollution through inclusive community engagement and social innovation. As part of an interdisciplinary CS project, an abductive systematic combining methodology was employed, which allowed for dialogue and collaboration between theory and practice throughout the whole process, during which separate groups of experts and potential end-users were involved. The article presents (i) the stakeholder engagement strategy codified in the SOCIO-BEE toolkit as a robust, actionable and inclusive foundation of engagement to CS activities; and (ii) the digital platform UX that allows setting up campaigns for measurements and assignment to citizens, incorporating the requirements for flexibility, accessibility, limited digital literacy, inclusion and legal and ethical considerations. Their combination and mutual interaction aim to leverage the pros of CS and technology whilst reducing their cons to ensure the four pillars of applicability, scalability, actionability, and inclusion. This is supported by the presented hybrid model which combines physical and virtual spaces and individual and collective action.