A Global Network for Global Impact: Citizen Science Global Partnership
The Citizen Science Global Partnership (CSGP) brings together citizen science networks and practitioners from around the world in a “network-of-networks” that seeks to promote and advance Citizen Science for a sustainable world.
At the partnership’s core are the six citizen science associations that cover most of the globe: the Australian Citizen Science association (ACSA), Citizen Science Africa Association, CitizenScience.Asia, the US-based Citizen Science Association (CSA), the European Citizen Science Association (ECSA), and the Ibero-American Network of Participatory Science (RICAP). The main goal of CSGP is to promote and support their collaboration with international organizations and governments to further the use of citizen science on a global scale, and to tackle global sustainability challenges.
To this aim, CSGP will establish diverse and inclusive partnerships across geographies, cultures, and research domains, promoting citizen science as a unifying, enabling and multiplying force for change. This involves coordinating with representatives of public and private organizations, including international organisations, national agencies, research institutions, NGOs and more. To maximize impact at all levels, from project scaling to knowledge advancement, the partnership will establish global communities of practice and working groups that advance citizen science, and offer strategic guidance and support for the exchange of knowledge, practices and lessons learnt, and encourage the scaling up of citizen science initiatives.
As a guiding principle, CSGP is keen to promote Open Science standards for citizen science, including the collection and exchange of open and findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR) citizen science data for global challenges. By identifying, studying and promoting the contributions of citizen science to sustainable development, CSGP will foster the development of a robust academic analysis of global citizen science,
Originally launched in December 2017 at the UN Science-Policy-Business Forum on the Environment, it has taken almost 5 years of global collaboration and the contributions of many different stakeholders to optimize the concept for maximal global impact. Finally, CSGP has been legally created as a non-profit association in Austria in Oct 022, with the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences (BOKU, Vienna, Austria) and the University of Geneva (UNIGE, Geneva, Switzerland) as founding members. The partnership is managed by the general secretariat at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA, Laxenberg, Austria), and supported with strategic communication by the CS Center Zurich.
The CSGP is looking forward to welcoming more CSAs as members, as well as civil society and private sector organizations active in the area of CS. For all info: info@citizenscienceglobal.org
Author: Rosy Mondardini (UZH)
