By Igno Notermans – DRIFT

What are best practices on how policymakers and citizen scientists work together? How does citizen science try to reach out to policy processes? And what kind of policy support is available for citizen science? Questions that might sound a bit dull, but are important ones  to answer in order to increase the uptake and  impact of citizen science initiatives all over Europe. 

We ask these questions in preparation for the six policy masterclasses ACTION will be organizing over the course of 2021 in six different countries (also see: https://actionproject.eu/masterclass/). One of these countries is Norway, where we recently hosted two focus groups where we invited a mixed group of citizen scientists, scientists, policymakers and other professionals. Of course, we are not sharing everything that is said there, but we can say that there is an increasing focus on inclusive and participatory processes from policy in our northern neighbors. There is also some great ongoing collaboration in biodiversity monitoring, but like in many other countries the method of citizen science to reach policy goals is not yet widely recognized. Something we will address in the policy masterclass in Norway in April 2021.