Citizen science is often entangled with the legal realm. One may think of citizen science as civic efforts demanding environmental justice through community-based monitoring. Existing literature has explored citizen science as creative and constructive civic responses to address citizens’ concerns for environmental issues. In addition to traditional environmental and climate protest movements, citizen science has formed a new horizon for realizing environmental justice and for facilitating proper law enforcement. Citizen science initiatives bring their evidence to court and advocate for legitimizing their contribution under international conventions and national legal frameworks. In these efforts, we also identify a claim to ‘epistemological justice’ that involves systematizing local knowledge, which is often seen as anecdotal and sporadic, into data that can aid policy or judicial decisions.

Research on the connections between statutory law, case law and scholarship on citizen science is scarce. This special collection on where environmental citizen science meets the law fills this gap. Through the special collection, we explore different forms of citizen science in the legal realm that are already present and may become more prominent in the coming years. Articles feature existing conflicts acted out in court, when citizen science is recognized to push for changes in response to institutional governance gaps, and furthermore, examples of public institutions preparing for, or resisting, citizen science as legitimate input for decision-making and for law enforcement. Several articles point to the entanglement between these socio-legal and institutional contexts and contribute to a promising debate with thorough scholarly analyses.

This special collection was supported by the Swedish Research Council for Sustainable Development (FORMAS) under the project Citizen Science: Collecting and using data for societal change (DNR 2017-01212).

Image by Alice Toietta, SensJus project (CC BY 4.0)