What If Citizens Participate in Research Project ? a Democratic Governance of Science.

There is a growing demand to include Civil Society in research process last few years. One reason frequently cited in favor of CSO involvement in research is that it can help “democratize science”, giving citizens a voice. Participatory action research, as well as collaborative planning or technological assessments for instance are very different ways of including Civil Society Organisations in research projects. Despite the potential importance of CSOs, little was known until recently about the practice of including them in research projects.

While many research projects involve citizens in specific actions (such as consensus conferences), few include individual citizens not organized in a collective group. (Examples are projects dealing with citizen science, the social sector and the arts). It is very difficult to involve citizens directly and in every step of research projects. CSOs can provide direct access to citizens’ views, and in many cases act as a skilled mediator between the research team and citizens’ inputs.  The majority of research projects with CSO participation feature CSOs that address specific interests such as patients, industry, agriculture, fishing, etc. But that seems to be changing. The progressive awareness of environmental risks by different stakeholders have highlighted that public engagement “upstream” in research project could help to find robust solutions (Callon, Lascoume, Barthe, 2001) to environmental matters.

In this paper we will analyse how and to what extent scientific research projects including CSOs may mobilize and create new collaborative routines and innovate in the environmental field.

We will use 15 case studies of 15 participative research projects coming from the CONSIDER project.

Hence, CSO involvement in research tends to be able to overcome some sorts of scientific closure, when sharing diagnostic and research tasks in such manner that every partner commitment is recognized.