Why this Toolkit?

The success of COs relies on the active participation and commitment of all related stakeholders. COs can be seen as spaces for participants to meet and work together as they discuss and try to solve shared environmental problems. Key elements of a CO are the systems they have for tracking data, their resources, the activities they do, their shared values about the world/their community, the members’ expectations, and trust among the members. Each CO stakeholder interprets the concepts of participation and governance through their own role and ideological lens and in connection with their own values. There can sometimes be a lack of trust between the key actors in a CO (Hager et al., 2021) and clashes of expectations or motivations, such as regarding the timing, the types of results that a CO can deliver, the uptake of CO data in decision making, and subsequent changes in policy (Wehn and Almomani, 2019). The CitiObs ‘CO Participation Toolkit’ provides the means to avoid or navigate such clashes (or even controversies, such as whether air quality policies result at any governance level) with tools and methods to strengthen the triangle of trust, - the mutual trust between citizens, institutions (authorities), and civil society - which is the key to COs achieving their full potential.

The resulting, final toolkit is structured as follows:

• What are participation dynamics in a Citizen Observatory?

• How can we examine/understand the participation dynamics in our Citizen Observatory?

• How can we improve participation dynamics in our Citizen Observatory?

  • How can we (re)build trust and cultivate cooperation between stakeholders participating in the citizen observatory?

  • How can we ensure that the views and interests of all stakeholders are taken into account?

  • How can we manage decision making within our citizen observatory in the face of uncertainty and complexity?

  • How can we manage and resolve conflicts between stakeholders in our citizen observatory?

  • How can we identify the root causes of problems with stakeholder interactions in our citizen observatory?

  • How can we ensure uptake of CO- generated data?