Contributions of Citizen Science to the Sustainable Development Goals: Is Transformative “Global” Citizen Science Possible?

Various efforts have been undertaken to encourage citizen science contribution to the United Nations’ (UN’s) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). These attempts are connected chiefly to the measurement of specific sustainability indicators. Using perspectives from critical theories on equity and justice to review the recent literature on employing citizen science for the SDGs, we argue that those advocating that citizen science be used for monitoring and fulfilling global sustainability goals should also be attentive to questions of historically inequitable power relations in the production of knowledge, and they should embrace both decolonial perspectives on science as well as a humbler stance on global data monitoring and governance. While we have argued elsewhere that citizen science should be attentive to various forms of exclusion and epistemic injustice, such attentiveness is even more relevant in the context of attempting to globalize citizen science activities. For this, we draw on alternative forms of citizen science, namely citizen social science and tracking science