The potential of citizen science for promoting sustainable food production and consumption

This PhD research project is part of the VIB Grand Challenge project: Catching rhizobia to introduce high protein containing soybean for a sustainable agriculture in Flanders. To date, soy is mainly being imported from deforested areas in South American countries. The Grand Challenge project aims to introduce soy as an alternative protein crop for sustainable agriculture in Flanders. This project will engage with 1000 citizens that will grow soy in their own gardens and participate in surveys about their garden management and their (food) consumption behaviours. Within the project, a citizen science approach will be used to collect data from different locations in Flanders, both to acquire endogenous rhizobia, able to efficiently nodulate soybean, from Flemish soils, as well as to develop tailor-made inoculated seeds adapted to a particular soil and location. As such, the performance of the citizen science approach can be assessed from a data quality point of view. However, citizen science approaches can also serve to have an impact on policy making, raise public awareness and induce behavioural changes among citizens. This research, therefore, aims at developing a framework to evaluate factors that lead to performant citizen science approaches, with respect to data quality, awareness creation, policy impact and observed behavioural changes among citizens. To achieve this, performance indicators that can be used to assess (non-)success of citizen science approaches will be identified. Citizens participating in the project will be subjected to surveys at separate moments, and exposed to varying experimental treatments, such as different information provisioning, in order to identify factors that determine the (non-)success of citizen science approaches to promote sustainable food production and consumption. These factors will then be used to assess how one can improve the capacity of citizen science approaches to improve data quality, and raise the public awareness about the benefits of legumes and microbes, and inform agro-food system actors about the power of legumes for a more sustainable agri-food systems. As such, the proposed research will also be used to provide more generic insights into the performance of citizen science approaches and how this performance can be improved.