Abstract

The post-2015 Development Agenda has highlighted the need for partnerships between diverse stakeholders. Besides few exceptions made, formally governments do not usually collaborate with the private sector, civil society or even academia in statistical operations. In fact citizen science is mostly an under explored discipline in the official decision-taking processes. However, the 2030 Agenda boosted by the United Nations, advocates for a constructive convergence in the data quest and calls for untapped data partnerships to support the measurement of the Sustainable Development Goals. This session will portray new methodologies for strengthening capacity building in National Statistical Offices (NSOs) for nationwide challenges like the monitoring of Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). The angle that the session will discuss is the institutional void of direct citizen involvement in the SDG quest, identifying potentialities and limitations of civil society collaborating with governments to boost assistance from citizen science for the SDGs.

The post-2015 Development Agenda has highlighted the need for partnerships between diverse stakeholders. Besides few exception made, formally governments do not usually collaborate with private sector, civil society or even academia in statistical operations. In fact citizen science is mostly an unexplored discipline in the official decision taking processes. Evidence shows that actors have different tensions and incentives towards data. However, the 2030 Agenda boosted from the United Nations, advocates for a constructive convergence in the data quest and calls for untapped data partnerships to support the measurement of the Sustainable Development Goals.

The proposed session will portray and discuss new methodologies for strengthening capacity building in National Statistical Offices (NSOs) for nationwide challenges like the multilevel Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) reporting operations. The angle of analysing this institutional void is to understand why and how governments reveal they are not opening to receive assistance from citizen science.

The session aims to profile new types of working arrangements, e.g. data partnerships between governments and third parties, which among other includes the integration of administrative registries, co-produced surveys, and crowdsourcing data from untapped sources for official statistics such as civil society or academia. In particular, the storyline will describe and draw vital lessons from the portrayed experiences of citizen-rooted non-governmental organisation that have essayed solutions in the form of data partnerships.