Sustainability and citizen science

This chapter reviews research on sustainability and citizen science by examining various crowd-empowered open approaches and potential complexities in their applications. To harness the wisdom of citizens in tackling grand sustainability challenges, crowd-based collaboration frameworks such as robust action, open innovation in science, and open strategy formulation are found to be effective in promoting knowledge sharing and integration, establishing common ground for collaboration, allowing experimentations of distinctive and distributed pathways, and encouraging co-creation of innovative solutions. However, research demonstrates that complexities associated with participants' knowledge gaps, contentious conflict, self-promotion, and temporal coordination, as well as issues pertaining to ethics and data quality and management can emerge from such processes and thus call for attention from scholars and practitioners. Implications for future citizen science research on sustainability that maximizes the novelty and implementability of citizen-generated solutions as well as facilitates the co-evolution of the wisdom of crowds, participatory architectures, and governing approaches are discussed in this chapter.