To tackle societal challenges, citizen participation provide a relatively new perspective for developing workable, accepted, scalable and shared solutions and implementations that are supported and used by and within society. Without citizens’ participation, complex system changes or behavioral changes will be hard to realize throughout society. We therefore see an expectation at national and local government levels, towards increased involvement of civil society in the affairs and decisions of policy-setting bodies.
Citizen participation is also considered a promising approach for realizing transformative innovation policies. However, in spite of the general support for the idea of involving citizens, there is relatively little knowledge about effective, inclusive and responsible ways of citizen participation in research and innovation. For example, all five proposals for the missions in Horizon Europe emphasize their ambitions to involve citizens, but none of them elaborates on the competences required from citizens, scientists, entrepreneurs or other participants to collaborate in a fruitful way.
In this session we aim to take stock of experiences with citizen participation in different domains: public administration, living laboratories, and scientific research. The assumption is that the knowledge from these domains can help to develop a more refined perspective on citizen participation with innovation and research for societal challenges or missions.
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