| dc.description.abstract | Participatory democracy has increasingly influenced contemporary western political development, research, and innovation in the last decades. Citizen Social Science is seen as a tool for incorporat-ing the ideals of participatory democracy into co-creative knowledge production. While interna-tional Citizen Social Science studies suggest that stakeholder involvement is imperative for effec-tive implementation and significant impacts, there are few empirical studies on how to conduct stakeholder management in practice.
The primary motivation of this thesis was to contribute to increased knowledge about concrete stakeholder management strategies by investigating the characteristics of the strategical work in YouCount, a trans-European, EU-funded research program which is at the forefront of the devel-opment of Youth Citizen Social Science.
The thesis project used a multifaceted qualitative data collection approach including participa-tory observations, semi-structured elite interviews with researchers, and internal document anal-yses. It was carried out in the three Scandinavian case studies of YouCount’s early project phases, from January to, and including, April 2022.
The study shows that the YouCount case studies, affected by prior contextual district knowledge, have taken advantage of built-in project flexibility, and chosen different stakeholder recruitment strategies. This has affected who, when, and how stakeholders are involved in the project and even the interpretation of the project’s main stakeholder management concepts. The empirical data identifies social tasks for securing safe and efficient environments as important aspects of participation.
The thesis indicates that future citizen social science projects which aim to contribute to partic-ipatory democracy could benefit from a clearer developed strategic framework for contextual nav-igation and recruitment of relevant stakeholders, for the implementation of central stakeholder management concepts, for utilising internal and external stakeholders, and for ensuring socially safe research environments for young citizen scientists. | en_US |
