Establishing citizen science hubs in european research performing and funding organisations to drive institutional change and ground responsible research and innovation in society
Europe’s Research Performing and Funding Organisations (RPFOs) have a crucial role to play as agents of institutional change towards firmly grounding RRI in our society. The successful fulfilment of this challenging yet highly significant role calls for the values of RRI to be well-embedded into their governance as well as their operation with greater and more systematic participation of citizens and all R&I stakeholders. INCENTIVE is set on empowering European RPFOs to establish sustainable transdisciplinary hubs for stimulating and supporting excellent citizen science with engaged roles for all R&I stakeholders in line with RRI principles. To this end, we start by establishing and demonstrating the potential of such Citizen Science Hubs in 4 world class RPFOs covering all 4 MoRRI Country Clusters, including University of Twente (NL), Autonomous University of Barcelona (ES), Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (EL) and Vilnius Gediminas Technical University (LT). We tailor the governance and operating models of their hubs to their unique institutional specificities and regional ecosystems of R&I stakeholders, before putting them to the test to drive institutional change through a series of RRI-grounding actions conducted with and for society (citizen science, co-creation of public policies, R&I agenda setting, etc.). All in all, our Citizen Science Hubs, besides being a sustainable institutional change themselves, will serve as a vehicle for introducing substantial institutional changes in our RPFOs and their communities. We will closely monitor, evaluate and report the performance and outcomes of our Citizen Science Hubs and their actions, providing evidence of societal, democratic, economic and scientific impacts. Along the way, we will foster mutual learning and networking opportunities amongst RPFOs across Europe to share our experiences and develop practical tools to enable RPFOs to drive similar institutional changes in other contexts.