Social license through citizen science: a tool for marine conservation

Rachel Kelly,Gretta T Pecl,Aletta Bonn,Aysha Fleming,Anett Richter

doi:10.5751/es-10704-240116

Abstract

Kelly, R., A. Fleming, G. T. Pecl, A. Richter, and A. Bonn. 2019. Social license through citizen science: a tool for marine conservation. Ecology and Society 24(1):16. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-10704-240116

Highlights

Public engagement through dialogue and participation in science is essential to improve knowledge about the environment and to support evidence-based decision making for sustainable use of ecosystems and natural resources
Citizen science programs provide opportunity for open discourse that is accessible to the public (McKinley et al 2017), and our study demonstrates that citizen science can play a role in enhancing social license for marine conservation (Fig. 1) in Europe by: (1) legitimizing science, i.e., opening science to the public and creating a joint evidence base for decisionmaking; (2) improving ocean literacy, i.e., building participants’ understanding about marine issues; and (3) promoting marine citizenship by connecting participants to the ocean
We have demonstrated clear linkages between citizen science and social license that are useful for exploration and application in a marine context, and in terrestrial space

Summary

Introduction

Public engagement through dialogue and participation in science is essential to improve knowledge about the environment and to support evidence-based decision making for sustainable use of ecosystems and natural resources. Understanding social acceptability of natural resource uses is crucial for environmental management (Gall and Rodwell 2016); a failure to consider whether social license exists for conservation activities can result in the failure and contestation of initiatives and management decisions (Garnett et al 2018). Limited knowledge exists on how to obtain and maintain social license through public engagement, which we consider includes good transparency and diversified means of communication for community dialogue (Kelly et al 2018). Social license is “an unwritten social contract” from the public for government, industry, or science to use and manage natural resources, including the marine environment (Moffat et al 2016). Discussion around social license is growing in the media and in different bodies of academic literature, both in terrestrial and marine contexts (Boutilier 2014, Kelly et al 2017), arguably in response to an increasingly (mis)informed society and decreasing trust in politics, government (Smits et al 2017), and natural resource management (van Putten et al 2018a)

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Conclusion