Participatory knowledge production and their transformative potential for environmental justice: the case of Matanza-Riachuelo river basin (Buenos Aires, Argentina)?

ACTIS, GUILLERMINA; SWISTUN, DÉBORA; ARZA, VALERIA

Trieste (online)

Conferencia; ECSA 2020 conference - Encounters in citizen science; 2020

AbstractSocio-environmental issues concerns are considered ?wicked? problems. Both the academic literature and policy recommendations have pointed to the need of introducing a more diverse set of stakeholders to the discussion on how to addresssolve them (Bäckstrand, 2003; Gallopín & Vessuri, 2006; Stirling et al., 2007). Similarly Vessuri (2004) discusses the idea of explicitly and reflexively acknowledging the heterogeneity in knowledge production for sustainability issues and argues that mechanisms for social participation must be created. As recently pointed out by Sauerman et. al. (2020), citizen science projects can support sustainability transitions by relying on participants? technical expertise and their socio-political knowledge, which contribute to a better identification of problems, mobilise resources and facilitate socio-technical evolution. However, as these authors claim, the social impact of citizen science projects depends on their capacity to guarantee scale, diversity and intensity of participation.In this context, the literature has identified a series of challenges faced by citizen science practices aim at enhancing social/sustainable transformation (Den Broeder et al., 2018; Heiss & Matthes, 2017; Kythreotis et al., 2019; Sauermann et al., 2020): challenges around participation: sustaining citizens? engagement to foster collaboration and potential co-creation. This requires capacity building activities and motivation.challenges of financial sustainability: availability of resources to support participatory exercises, training activities (for citizens and professional researchers who may not have pre-existing capabilities for facilitating such processes) and tool development.challenges of academic and institutional spheres: the researchers face the pressures of funding and tenure systems that may not recognize participatory processes as important or relevant, and even question their validity. challenges of validation of the results: especially when introducing the relationship between citizen science and social and/or public policy issues, the participatory processes? outputs and results introduce discussions of their validation, standardization and representativeness.To address such challenges, some authors argue that there is a need to build a knowledge coalition of civil society groups and organisations with previous experiences working around the project?s goal (Bonhoure et al. 2019). This approach constitutes a pragmatic strategy for the project?s community definition (Bergold & Thomas, 2012), in which it becomes key to involve relevant actors with different experience and expertise. As an initial step for the definition of this community, our R&I Action proposes the identification and analysis of previous participatory experiences in the basin in which citizens have been involved in knowledge mobilization. In this paper, we discuss how knowledge creation around socio-environmental problems in the Matanza-Riachuelo basin has been mobilised by different initiatives. We explore how they have triggered tangible socio-political results with the purpose of understanding the strategies that such projects enact to overcome the challenges anticipated in the literature. We assess how they manage to sustain participation and project activities, how they introduce quality and standardized criteria in politically contended contexts and how they institutionalised the involvement of professional researchers. More than 6,000,000 people live in the Matanza-Riachuelo basin, distributed in 14 municipalities in the Province of Buenos Aires and in the City of Buenos Aires. In the basin there are many areas affected by pressing conditions such as serious pollution, lack of access to adequate housing and basic infrastructure (mainly drinkable water and sewer services), health and education. These have direct effects on the quality of life (FARN et al., 2017; Nápoli, 2009; Swistun, 2013). The environmental justice conflict surrounding the case is paradigmatic in terms of citizen participation, as a legal action initiated by local communities stated the collective nature of the right to a healthy environment in Argentina, moving the issue into the public agenda and promoting the creation of public policies (Merlinsky, 2016). After the legal conflict was initiated, the national government created a public authority of the basin (ACUMAR) to be in charge of the coordination and implementation of the Supreme Court?s sentence. Important achievements have been accomplished, such as producing information about the sources and consequences of pollution, controlling certain industries, and cleaning up the river banks. In all cases, there were social organizations and NGOs involved in the mobilization of different stakeholders. We analyse previous initiatives that have led to knowledge creation, in order to map organizations and practices that are already referred to in the literature dealing with socio environmental problems in the basin and using snowball methods in interview-based research.