The discoveries of citizens running around

Abstract

Three years ago, the autonomous citizen science project Meet je Stad (Measure your City) formed a community in Amersfoort that developed its own instruments to measure climatic change locally. Like many citizen science projects, this initiative faces challenges to being considered a legitimate and credible way of extending climate research, or as a source of robust information for local climate risk governance. In this article, we will provide a social history of this project, of its activities, motivations and forms of organizations. We will focus on their practices, their connection to academic science, and their guiding narratives of change. These narratives are concerned with both changes to the climate and social changes to what is considered a legitimate way of scientifically studying the climate. In this article we argue that autonomous citizen science avoids some of the pitfalls that caused the legitimation crisis of climate science and is a useful expansion of risk governance in the context of societal change.