The Lemmings Dilemma: An Examination of Environmental Justice,Volunteerism,and the Pursuit of Empowerment in Biodiversity Conservation Organizations in Canada

Ineffective engagement as a pathology

The pathologies metaphor encourages conservation scholars and practitioners to critically reflect on how dysfunctions within their organizational networks condition ongoing biodiversity conservation failures. To the growing suite of challenges first articulated by Holling and Meffe, an EJ lens adds the apolitical mindset that often permeates citizen science projects that reflect an “objective” scientific worldview. Even when programs have a significant educational mission, scholars acknowledge they can reinforce scientific expertise and a devaluation of lay knowledge as lacking, incomplete, or unsystematic. Rather than acknowledging the possibility that scientists might learn or that science might change, citizen science projects often seek to make layfolks more like scientists through cognitive, affective, and behavioral changes.

Present critiques of citizen science notwithstanding, even the most critical scholars acknowledge the potential for projects and programs to offer real opportunities for communities to ensure EJ is realized. This requires that relations are carefully structured into a more equitable exercise with authority and benefits flowing both ways. One strategy is careful attention to engagement design at the program scale, with emphasis on meaningful interactions and recognition of volunteer needs within the development of project functions. The yield from careful engagement design is often trust-based relationships that continue to have cascading positive impacts on conservation efforts throughout the life of a project or program.

We acknowledge there are pathologies beyond the issue of ineffective engagement that are conspiring to inhibit the global effort to abate biodiversity loss. Still, as the pace and magnitude of such loss quicken, the possible contributions of citizen and community science stand out as requiring special attention. There is potential to expand collaborative stewardship efforts into remote and underserved regions including, but not limited to, Indigenous and local communities that have suffered the greatest consequences of biodiversity loss and climate change. ¹⁰ Such innovations must be pursued with the utmost care, as traditional forms of citizen science have not always unfolded in ways that center community needs effectively and ethically. ¹¹

One reason to explore coproduction practices in citizen and community science is that thoughtful engagement design is critical at the broader scale of the policy arena. At this scale, politically attuned programs are immersed in politics through which scientific knowledge becomes grafted to (or decoupled from) the drive to secure positive conservation outcomes. ¹² McKinley et al. suggest that citizen and community science ultimately influences policy and management outcomes through two separate but related paths. ¹³ The first path involves the acquisition of scientific information as an input for decision making. The second path involves a public engagement mechanism that can influence outcomes indirectly or directly through the policy process.

In short, ineffective engagement stemming from poor or absent engagement design can increase the likelihood of conservation failure. One of the most common ways this happens is through how project goals are set, communicated, and tracked. Active participation and codesigning clear goals and social targets with the community are vital to tracking if a project is meeting its objectives and identifying when adaptation is needed. To this end, Bottrill et al. highlight that social targets need to be better organized and managed in many conservation projects, at least if researchers want to know what went wrong and what worked. ¹⁴ As we now explore, the EJ lens is useful in understanding why some relational approaches work, whereas others fail.

Centering relationships in partnership and engagement

The advent of the twenty-first century sparked considerable reflection on the potential of growing and formalizing university–community partnerships. Academic and community leaders recognized the ability to leverage the strengths of partnerships to address problems of growing concern (e.g., global environmental challenges). Universities, governments, and a wide range of third parties (e.g., funders beyond government) have become progressively more interested and committed to knowledge mobilization. ¹⁵ These interests have ranged from how stronger connections can be made between research, policy, and practice to the role of universities in democracy and civic life more broadly. ¹⁶ This new capacity has aligned with other benefits, like improved student learning through social engagement and the potential to promote the relevance of what are often opaque institutions within the minds of citizens. ¹⁷ A report from the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada (AUCC) captures these aspirations for mutual benefit and exchange:

The AUCC vision of partnership calls for accountability for the differing approaches, perceptions, and roles of each actor in a relationship. Ultimately, this requires critical reflection upon issues of trust, reciprocity, equity, power, and knowledge. ¹⁹ Hall adds the need for sound community engagement to produce a collective vision and a commitment to sharing power so that benefits accrue to all partners (and a broad segment of the community). ²⁰ Although we acknowledge a trend toward earnest relationship-building in Canada and elsewhere, postsecondary institutions have a long history of broken relations that stem from their unilateral (and often unwanted) delivery of knowledge. ²¹ Rather than coidentified outputs, translation and dissemination processes often emphasize knowledge valued by the institution, sometimes derived from data collection that sees community knowledge disappear. ²²

The preceding emphasis on relationships is relevant to citizen and community science scholarship, particularly in the context of understanding and delivering on community needs, a critical EJ focus. Community science has become a platform for biodiversity partnerships to take place. Scholars point out that well-designed programs create continuous investment and feedback loops for a diverse community to shape program functions and outputs in order to meet the needs of both academic and community actors. ²³ For example, the well-used community science program “eBird” has exploded in popularity. It presents an interesting case of how a project initially designed for data collection has leveraged partnerships to become a major source of collaboration around the use of biodiversity data. ²⁴ In addition, partnerships with researchers from broad domains have expanded the value of collaboration beyond just data collection to connecting with policy decision makers and land managers to take direct conservation action. ²⁵ eBird has evolved from a stand-alone citizen science project focused on collecting data to a cooperative partnership involving multiple scientific domains and dozens of partner organizations, each with its own unique interests in the project’s success. ²⁶ Central to the success of this partnership, actors involved highlight the importance of establishing trust and a mutual commitment toward accomplishing common goals to achieving evidence-based conservation decision making. ²⁷

Although not typically conceived as partners, scholars have extensively examined the reasons that participants engage in a relationship with a citizen or community science project. Common motivations include opportunities to develop knowledge specific to an environmental domain, the ability to convene with and connect to a place, and the opportunity to contribute one’s efforts to a broader collective goal. ²⁸ The choice to volunteer with a project is also shaped by structural factors, including trends like demographic aging, evolving family and labor market structures, and differences in the socioeconomic realities of demographic cohorts. Finally, these factors are situated within ongoing broader cultural change, including an alarming recent decline in public trust in higher education institutions. ²⁹

Although it is challenging to translate a set of forces into long-term implications for any single project or program, data linking socioeconomic patterns to volunteering are well known.

In Canada, data suggest a clear link between age and volunteering. In 2013, Statistics Canada found that the highest rate of volunteering was among youth aged 15–19 (66%), although data also showed that volunteers aged 65–74 provided the most volunteer hours. ³⁰ Trends were similar in 2018, where older adults “were much more likely to be considered the top volunteers” and were also likely to age out of this role beginning in their mid-70s. ³¹ In the context of volunteering specifically in citizen and community science, a large national survey in Great Britain found statistically significant connections between participation and age, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status. This includes an underrepresentation of members from racialized and lower socioeconomic communities. ³²

Evidence related to volunteerism suggests a clear need to better understand who community members are as partners in efforts to coproduce environmental (and other) knowledge through citizen and community science. The university–community partnership literature provides a cautionary tale. The efforts of institutions in Western countries to establish relationships with partners “have been largely driven by charges of elitism and disconnection of scholarly practice (both teaching and research) from the communities in which universities are located.” ³³ Some of these charges stem from the perceptions (justified or not) that postsecondary institutions are disconnected from the political realities of their communities, are uninterested in reciprocal relationships, and/or are unwilling to challenge norms that reify whose knowledge counts. ³⁴ Similar challenges are documented in a literature that is increasingly critical of citizen science, as one person engaged in an EJ-related project describes:

There remains a pressing need to explore the sources and impacts of ineffective engagement on conservation outcomes. Catalano et al. found that successful projects are reported almost four times more often than failures within the literature. ³⁶ Although the definition of “ineffective” is ultimately subjective, Dickson et al. note that critically examining what is going well and what seems not to be going well, however precisely defined, is key to learning. ³⁷ With this in mind, we turn to outlining our project design, which tapped the experiences of community science program coordinators to better understand the challenges of engagement in biodiversity conservation.

Case study methodology

Case study methodology provides a beneficial research approach when understanding a phenomenon of interest requires an exploration of how that phenomenon is situated within and shaped by the surrounding context. Case studies are also flexible, in that they can accommodate a range of data collection methods, which is often required when examining dynamic, multiscale policy problems. ³⁸ Within the realm of case study design, Yin ³⁹ distinguishes between holistic designs that have a single unit of analysis and embedded designs that include multiple units of analysis. He also distinguishes between designs with a single case and those with multiple cases. The research proposed here adopts a single-case design wherein community science represents a case study of community engagement within the broader field of conservation science and practice. The design is holistic, in that program staff and coordinators were a consistent data source across 17 different community science programs with an emphasis on biodiversity conservation.

Data collection and analysis

This study uses community science as a distinct case to learn about community engagement in the field of biodiversity conservation. As hubs of community science programs and knowledge, the digital repositories CitSci and SciStarter were a starting point for identifying relevant programs. These two sources were supplemented with queries about additional candidate programs to colleagues in the research team’s professional networks. Following a process similar to that outlined in the previous work by members of the research team in two separate academic studies, ⁴⁰ community science programs were selected following a criteria-based approach. ⁴¹ To be eligible for recruitment, a community science program had to:

have a focus on biodiversity conservation;

Community science program staff and coordinators are an appropriate and underexamined unit of analysis for addressing our objective. As professionals involved in the design and delivery of conservation programming, program staff and coordinators have intimate experience with knowledge coproduction within a community science context. The selection of candidate programs was the starting point for the identification of program staff and coordinators who were willing to share their experience and expertise.

Data collection involved semi-structured interviews with community and citizen staff and coordinators. ⁴² This included 16 individuals working as part of 11 distinct programs and/or projects across Canada. Participants all worked in the capacity of designing different program functions, managing project logistics, and/or coordinating volunteers. Although roles varied, all participants were involved directly in work that attuned them to the experience of participants within their program or project and often strategic decision making about the type of experience that was desired.

As potential participants in this study were drawn from across Canada, 45- to 60-minute interviews were conducted virtually using the Zoom platform or by phone where preferred by the participant. In the case of both Zoom and telephone interviews, the production of interview transcripts was facilitated by Zoom’s built-in voice-to-text function. All transcripts were checked against the audio recording for accuracy and used in a conventional bottom-up thematic analysis. This thematic analysis followed the techniques and stages described by Charmaz ⁴³ and was previously used by members of the research team in two separate academic studies. ⁴⁴ Representation of this analysis in the following section uses pseudonyms for individuals and programs to protect anonymity.

Relationships in program design

Scholars working in the fields of citizen and community science and university–community partnerships have simultaneously pointed to the need for intentional community engagement within broader partnership initiatives. ⁴⁵ We were interested in learning from program coordinators not just about participant motivations but also whether and how such motivations were reflected in engagement design. In many cases, coordinators and staff were well aware of the growing critique of traditional citizen science and sought to operate differently by using participant motivations as a design parameter to create meaningful experiences. As might be expected, the form of a “meaningful experience” varied by program but reflected a common and perhaps paradoxical recognition. To advance biodiversity conservation, coordinators recognized that the design of community science programs must find ways to center and more deeply value people—at least as far as their role in a project is concerned.

In the Healthy Waters Program, coordinators used (by name) codesign processes to align water monitoring goals with community values. Rather than picking locations important from a “scientific perspective,” local knowledge and connections to the place were used to select monitoring locations aligned with community recreational values. By engaging community members early in the planning process and genuinely tailoring project decisions to local priorities, coordinators of the Healthy Waters Program ensure that the community’s needs are reflected in a shared implementation of program goals. ⁴⁶ For the Rural Knowledges Program, the use of codesign proved similarly beneficial by allowing project functions to adapt continually to the contextual needs of each newly engaged community. As comments from the program coordinator reflect, developing community science around a “have solution will travel” approach is likely a starting point for mismatching community needs and program resources. As a one-off, this may have little perceptible impact. Over time and across community networks, it may contribute toward the types of distrust that are well documented in scholarship on university–community partnerships. ⁴⁷ Centering the health of relationships by designing with partners’ motivations in mind ensures program resources target the unique needs of each community, even as a project expands geographically and over time.

Burke and Heynen note that citizen science can be guilty of conceptualizing learning as a unilateral transfer of scientific knowledge from trained expert to lay recipient. ⁷ Although we caution against broad generalization, we note that many of the coordinators we spoke to recognize the limitations that come with this model. Rather than staff educating participants, staff–participant interactions were described as a way to cultivate reciprocal learning about key program functions that might lead to valuable innovations. In one example, the Lake Health Monitoring Program used a design where objectives are set by local participants, with staff engaged on an as-needed basis. Coordinators enable this model using built-in feedback loops to monitor program function, particularly whether and how the project is meeting community needs. Comments from Fatima, a coordinator with the Lake Health Monitoring Program, indicate that when this level of relational accountability is present, other difficult-to-mobilize goals like translating knowledge into political action can evolve naturally.

New pathways for partnership

It is important to note that while we connected exclusively with biodiversity conservation-related programs, the coordinators we spoke to represent diverse contexts across Canada. This includes a wide diversity of participant/partner networks. This fact is important to the finding that a majority of coordinators acknowledged the retention and recruitment of volunteers as an ongoing and, in some cases, a growing challenge. Reflective of broader statistics around volunteering in Canada, ⁴⁸ volunteer networks in programs we spoke to seem to be undergoing a structurally driven demographic change. Owing to the aging of current volunteer cohorts, coordinators expressed a need to think about and promote a pivot toward specific modes of youth recruitment. In some cases, this was recognized as a general challenge; in others, it was highlighted as a genuine threat to program longevity, but in most, it was highlighted as a key priority.

The aging of volunteers was not just a concern from the perspective of the personal power provided to a project. Coordinators also recognize that volunteers are critical links within the knowledge network that sustains their program. Aging out represented the loss of decades worth of knowledge that is held by long-term volunteers, particularly knowledge of how to work effectively within a local context. This competency will be lost if they are unable to transfer lessons to new long-term recruits.

Along with retention and recruitment challenges rooted in demographic structure and change, program coordinators face additional constraints from the funding landscape. Coordinators are increasingly called upon to be creative and flexible in the design of programs that create meaningful experiences for volunteers. They are also asked to attract new participation while simultaneously facing a funding landscape that provides less and less flexibility to adjust to the market they are designing for. Although constraints can often be the impetus of innovative design, coordinators reflected a less enthusiastic experience of being caught between a rock and a hard place. Acquiring funding for research is challenging for all, but for community science programs, rigid funding models become untenable when the very nature of the type of cocreation (e.g., having open-ended objectives) that is needed to sustain success does not fit within the bounds of funding frameworks. ⁴⁹

Faced with rigid funding models and the demand to generate new recruitment pathways, one adaptive strategy coordinators identified is the pursuit of postsecondary partnerships. Trevor from the Foraging Animal Stewardship Program states that “one of the big things that keeps [community science] from happening the way it should is because we are not associated directly with the university in Canada.” Partnering with postsecondary institutions was viewed as a requirement and necessity to gain access to broader funding opportunities. This closely reflects findings from scholarship on university–community partnerships, which has shown that community partners can benefit from several critical resources held by postsecondary institutions. This includes funding (grants, etc.), skilled and knowledgeable staff (students and faculty), and time (research is a mandate of universities). ⁵⁰

As community science programs contemplate postsecondary partnerships as one way to alleviate the pressures they face, we highlight the importance of the need for “social accountability.” In this context, Anderson et al. ⁵¹ describe social accountability as “the idea that universities have a moral and civic duty to respond to the needs of communities that surround the academy when designing and teaching curriculum and conducting research.” Although a laudable normative goal, in our experience university–community partnerships are almost always multidimensional and dynamic. At their best, they represent collaborations that explicitly aim for cocreation and coproduction of place-based knowledge and actions. As Lewis and Sadler argue, university actors “committed to the cause” can help partners sustain a program even where typical resource streams run dry. ⁵² At their worst, the authors also offer an equally clear assessment of the long-term costs of partnerships where university actors pursue “partnerships” where only the university researchers count. Over time university–community partnerships can be both meaningful and highly prejudicial, depending upon how inherent challenges are acknowledged and navigated. Citizen science partnerships are no exception.