How Does Citizen Science "Do" Governance? Reflections from the DITOs Project

Citizen science (CS) is increasingly becoming a focal point for public policy to provide data for decision-making and to widen access to science. Yet beyond these two understandings, CS engages with political processes in a number of other ways. To develop a more nuanced understanding of governance in relation to CS, this paper brings together theoretical analysis by social science researchers and reflections from CS practice. It draws on concepts from Science and Technology Studies and political sciences as well as examples from the "Doing-It-Together Science" (DITOs) project. The paper develops a heuristic of how CS feeds into, is affected by, forms part of, and exercises governance. These four governance modes are (1) Source of information for policy-making, (2) object of research policy, (3) policy instrument, and (4) socio-technical governance. Our analysis suggests that these four dimensions represent different conceptions of how science and technology governance takes place that have not yet been articulated in the CS literature. By reflecting on the DITOs project, the paper shows how this heuristic can enrich CS. Benefits include project organisers better communicating their work and impacts. In its conclusion, the paper argues that focusing on the complexity of governance relations opens up new ways of doing CS regarding engagement methodologies and evaluation. The paper recommends foregrounding the broad range of governance impacts of CS and reflecting on them in cooperation between researchers and practitioners

Sport for All in a financial crisis: survival and adaptation in competing organisational models of local authority sport services

This paper centres on the findings of research undertaken by the author for the Association of Public Service Excellence (APSE) that assesses local authority sport services in England in the context of an economic recession since 2008, the election of a national coalition government in 2010, and subsequent reductions in local government finance. The study took the form of a series of interviews with senior local authority personnel and sector representatives (n=55) underpinned by the findings of a nationwide survey (n=95) and a review of secondary sources. This paper centres on one theme to emerge from the study, namely, the demise of Sport for All, defined in terms of a government strategy designed to increase physical activity among the general population, in a context of financial attenuation and a political orientation away from direct state provision of services. The study found that competing organisational models of sport services across England underpin the retention or curtailment of Sport for All. In the ‘ensuring council’ model, sport services retain the core capacity to shape and deliver services an increasingly fragmented mixed local economy of provision. However, models that favour extending private or voluntary and community sector management pose significant challenges for councils seeking to retain Sport for All as a policy objective and as specific practices