Investigating the Participation Facets of Environmental Citizen Science Initiatives: A Systematic Literature Review of Empirical Research

Citizen science (CS) has shown tremendous popularity in recent years; however, there is still a lack of understanding of important aspects that determine citizens’ participation and involvement in CS initiatives. Although CS initiatives could serve as a means of promoting forms of participation that contribute to the democratization of science, limited attention is still being paid to the “citizen” component of the citizen science term. For this reason, a systematic literature review (SLR), aligned with the PRISMA methodology, was applied to empirical studies on citizens’ participation in environmental and nature-based CS initiatives established over the last two decades. The participatory aspect of the retrieved 119 CS initiatives was analysed on the basis of: (a) citizens’ participation and (b) environmental citizenship. Our findings show that the majority of the CS initiatives were mostly limited to the local scale, and they primarily followed the contributory model, in which volunteers were mostly treated as “data collectors”. Therefore, it is important to overcome barriers related to the design and implementation of CS that hinder citizens’ participation and, at the same time, to strengthen democratization through a more participatory engagement of active and aware citizens, thus promoting environmental citizenship.