Speaking about Citizen Science Initiatives that Provide Impact Through Sustainable Development Goals (SDG)

Post-2015 Development Agenda has highlighted the need for partnerships between diverse stakeholders. Besides few exception made, formally governments do not usually collaborate with private sector, civil society or even academia in statistical operations. They are still lagging behind what many organizations have clearly understand: produce and use replenished data or perish.

One of these far-sighted visions is what we call citizen science, an spontaneous participative phenomenon that takes people to the street to collect, organize, and disseminate data shared with scientists for imputing the sustainable development quest. This is mostly an unexplored discipline in the official decision taking processes, sometimes a bit isolated from actual local empowerment but one step forward from public placation, the act overcoming distrust and animosity.. Evidence shows that actors have different tensions and incentives along their endeavor. However, the 2030 Agenda boosted from the United Nations, advocates for a constructive convergence in the data quest and calls for untapped data partnerships to support the measurement of the Sustainable Development Goals.

Please find below our proposed session to run at next International Statistics Institute - World Statistics Congress where we will portray and discuss new methodologies for strengthening capacity building in National Statistical Offices (NSOs) for nationwide challenges like the multilevel Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) reporting operations. The angle of analyzing this institutional void is to understand why and how governments reveal they are not opening to receive assistance from citizen science, hence their own surveyed people. 

Please click on image above to download the IP "Map 4 Census: experimenting answers to how civil society can partner with governments to monitor the SDGs with data" .

Our invited paper to the session aims to profile new types of working arrangements, e.g. data partnerships between governments, and third parties, which among other includes the integration of co-produced surveys, and crowdsourcing data from untapped sources for official statistics such as civil society or academia. In particular, the storyline will describe and draw vital lessons from the portrayed experiences of citizen-rooted non-governmental organization that have essayed solutions in the form of data partnerships.