The present track is about the generation, analysis and use of environmental data as a form of science participation enacted from below. Governance of the environment is inextricably linked to data. Interventions, policies and future scenarios for sustainability are all based on data generated and analysed within specific institutional settings, such as supranational agencies, environmental protection agencies and official statistics. In this sense, the activities of analysis, publication and diffusion of environmental data actively contribute to shape and delimit the field of environmental governance’s authority through expertise.
Whatever the strategy pursued by decision makers may be (e.g. to defuse possible conflicts; to enlarge consensus), procedures of data collection and analysis, as well as their purpose, tend to be restricted to within accredited settings and further performed in institutional loci. Currently, these patterns may be bypassed by new trajectories ofengagement that develop alternative processes of empowerment for non-experts. Social movement research has signalled the growing tendency of grassroots movements, NGOs and activists to contest official data. Statactivism is conceptually a specific kind of participation as well as contestation by non-institutional actors using data analysis. Other research fellowships refer to data activism as particularly focusing on digital technologies adopted for the collection of data. This general tendency invests the environmental domain as well, and it offers new forms of participation through data. Indeed, environmental movements as well as other concerned groups not only put the role of institutional expertise under scrutiny; they can also contribute to developing alternative forms of scientific knowledge production. Thus, participation is transforming through the challenge of creating evidence and the organisation of data collection from below. This contrasts with solicited forms of participation through data, such as citizen-science projects. An S&TS perspective, paying attention to sociotechnical assemblages of data infrastructures and the practices related to them, may bring a better understanding of these ongoing processes. Therefore, the present track aims to gather theoretical as well as empirical proposals focussed on combinations of heterogeneous actors in relationship to data collection, management and sharing of environmental issues, such as (but not only limited to):
- heterogeneous assemblages for the generation of environmental data from below;
- design and creation of ad hoc infrastructures for data collection, analysis and sharing of environmental data;
- practices of maintenance and management of bottom-up data infrastructures;
- analysis of expertise aligned for the implementation of data infrastructures from below;
- practices of civic hacking for the environment; and
- the role of alternative baselines as new tools of political environmental participation.
