Challenges and opportunities for monitoring societal engagement: Insights from Berlin and Leiden

Authors: Anastasiia Iarkaeva (ORCiD) and Maaike Duine (ORCiD)

Following our previous events (the Open Science Dashboards role-play event and a panel discussion on defining openness in the Social Sciences and Humanities, our third (and final) event in the online event series "Magnifying Open Science" focused on one of the emerging yet often overlooked Open Science (OS) pillars of the UNESCO Open Science Recommendation (2021): Open Engagement of societal actors. We presented and discussed different monitoring approaches for one of the areas within this pillar: Citizen and participatory science.

Recommended citation: Iarkaeva, A. and M. Duine (2026). Challenges and opportunities for monitoring societal engagement: Insights from Berlin and Leiden. Open Research Blog Berlin. https://doi.org/10.59350/xj9cy-v0h89

We first shared insights from the Berlin University Alliance (BUA) Participatory Research Map (developed by the BUA Open Science Magnifiers project). Subsequently, Margaret Gold (Leiden University, the Netherlands) presented insights from her work at the Citizen Science Lab and shared the objectives of the recently funded MEECSE (Monitoring the implementation of Enabling Environments for Citizen Science & Societal Engagement practices) project. Dr. Antonella Maiello and Dr. Daniel Petrovics (Faculty of Governance and Global Affairs of Leiden University) shared insights from the EmPowerED (Enabling Positive Energy Districts through citizen-centered socio-technical models for upscaling of the heat transition) project. Although these projects pursue different monitoring approaches, they share a common goal in distinguishing societal engagement activities from other OS activities and increasing their visibility.

BUA Participatory Research Map

The BUA Participatory Research Map highlights the diversity of Participatory Research (PR) approaches across the Berlin University Alliance partner universities. Over 90 projects have been collected, and the collection showcases a wide diversity of applied approaches: Citizen Science (CS), Living Lab, Patient Engagement, Transdisciplinary Research, and Collaborative Action Research, across different disciplines. Within these projects, different levels of participation by non-scientific stakeholders, including consultation, involvement, and collaboration were categorized.

The PR Map aims both to categorise and to visualise the diversity of PR, promoting Open Science practices that extend beyond better known open practices, as for example Open Access publishing or Open Data and Code. There is no centralized coordination or systematic research on PR in the Berlin research area. Moreover, these PR approaches remain poorly recognized and difficult to assess within current research evaluation procedures. The PR Map aims not only to raise awareness of these practices within Berlin (and beyond), and to provide networking opportunities, but also to assess current trends and opportunities of PR.

Citizen Science Lab in the Netherlands

CS in the Netherlands is supported on national and regional levels through organizations such as Citizen Science NL and the recently launched Hub for Impactful and Engaged Research (HIER). Researchers across all disciplines are supported in their CS activities through awareness raising on types of engagement practices, their impacts, and by facilitating mutual learning between them. In her presentation, Margaret Gold showed how the Citizen Science Lab in Leiden also collaborates on a European and global level by developing standards to describe a range of participatory tasks and practices, e.g. for the European Citizen Science platform or the Public Participation in Scientific Research (PPSR) Core.

MEECSE project

The MEECSE (Monitoring the implementation of Enabling Environments for Citizen Science & Societal Engagement (CS&SE) practices) project is one of 19 recently funded projects researching open science in the Netherlands. The project aims to develop indicators for Citizen Science & Societal Engagement (CS&SE) practices, focusing on monitoring implementation, uptake and effectiveness of CS related practices. This reflects a transformation of assessing Open Science uptake from a primarily output-based view (Open Access publications, FAIR Data etc.), to a more broad perspective that includes CS&SE practices and processes. These practices cover a broad spectrum and, are often not clear and consistently defined, nor is their quantification beneficial to the scientific community. The MEECSE project frames these practices as CS&SE enabling environments, and aims to research how to support these enabling environments (e.g., role of data stewards and funding, trans– vs. interdisciplinarity), how to embed them within research institutes, and how to integrate these into OS Monitoring frameworks (such as the Dutch national OS monitor that is currently being developed).

EmPowerED project

Dr. Antonella Maiello and Dr. Daniel Petrovics presented the EmPowerED project. This NWO-funded project focuses on application strategies for the Energy Transition field, and brings together 49 partners across the Netherlands. It explores how to co-create knowledge on carbon-neutral heating, tailored to Positive energy districts (PED) within the Dutch context and its limited space. A key interest lies in how to effectively design and implement participatory approaches.

Antonella Maiello stressed the importance of understanding the definition of Citizen Science, which is often understood as a time-efficient and cost-effective way to collect data through citizens. However, the EmPowerED project emphasises that citizens are active and conscious knowledge co-creators, whose positions, perspectives, values and emotions shape research. Usually, Energy Transition research is a heavily technical domain and top-down pursued, where CS approaches are a niche. Nevertheless, Antonella Maiello and Daniel Petrovics pointed out that research findings (e.g. Gooding et al., 2024, Table 3) show a wide spectrum of citizens' roles in research, such as data set producers, site identifiers, technology testers/validators, policy advocates, public engagement facilitators, impact assessment auditors, and business model testers. Therefore, citizen participation should not be seen as merely an opportunity to increase project outputs, consisting of data collections produced by citizens, but as an emergent process.

Antonella Maiello and Daniel Petrovics additionally illustrated pitfalls of CS approaches in Energy Transition, which relates both to data collection (e.g., cultural or language literacy of citizens; sustainability of projects over time) and project design (e.g., citizen data is not properly used, which results in delays). It is still unclear how to properly design CS approaches and what skills or values would be needed. Within the project, literature review results will support development of a toolbox on matching engagement approaches to local PED contexts. This work in progress is preliminary but so far includes a set of 31 CS indicators in 7 categories: knowledge production, continuity and uptake, trust and transparency, capacity and learning, influence, quality, and reach. The aim is to move beyond simply counting projects towards tracking citizen contributions, their uptake, and their continuity over time.

Learnings and further thoughts on PR monitoring

Although all three projects engage with PR monitoring, the presentations and discussion revealed that not every monitoring approach is the same. For example, monitoring through a dashboard has a key limitation: categorisation cannot capture the complex picture of what should be acknowledged in the participatory research field. More comprehensive approaches, such as those developed in MEECSE and EmPowerED projects, are better suited to reflect this complexity.

At the current stage of defining participatory/CS&SE research for monitoring and meta-research purposes, we also deal with the complexity of defining the different terms for mutual understanding. Examples are the way individual terms such as "transdisciplinary research" and "participatory research" are understood, and whether they exist in opposition to each other or whether one is subordinate to the other.

The MORPHSS project (presented in the 2nd event) identified and described 30 open research practices within the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences. Among these, practices like Co-production, Collaborative Translation, Community-Based Participatory Research, Participatory Action Research (PAR), Public Scholarship, Research-Practice Partnerships align directly with CS&SE enabling environments. These practices are described as processes rather than outputs. Similarly, the MEECSE and EmPowerED projects seek to extend current approaches to understanding and monitoring open science, from output-focused towards more process-oriented. In the CS&SE / PR field, this can include contribution analysis of collaborations with stakeholders, interviews with partners at different project stages, or case studies as an evidence base for applied approaches and their impact.

In conclusion, we would like to emphasize the importance of dialogue between different communities and stakeholders involved in PR. Diversified perspectives contribute to more inclusive and practice-oriented approaches to OS monitoring, which can include disciplinary, societal or institutional differences, and enable mutual learning in the development of more robust OS Monitoring frameworks.

Links to presentations

Iarkaeva, A., Duine, M., Bobrov, E., Kindling, M., & Neufend, M. (2026, April 23). Magnifying Open Science: Insights from the BUA Participatory Research Map. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20159646

Petkovich, D., Maiello, A., & Gold, M. (2026, April 23). Magnifying Citizen Science: Three initiatives looking at monitoring and indicators for CS from a different angle. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20142924