Fostering Resilience and Adaptation to Drought in the Southern High Plains: Using Participatory Methods for More Robust Citizen Science

Abstract

Citizen science holds the potential and capacity to change the role of science in the face of current and impending environmental sustainability challenges. However, the sustainability science community must also address the ethical challenges inherent in the nature and outcomes of citizen participation and inclusion. In this article, we provide a brief history of Participatory Action Research (PAR), long popular in the social sciences, and explain how participatory methods can inform the process and products of citizen science to meet the dueling ideals of ethically engaging communities and producing more robust science. Our decade of human-environment research on drought resilience and adaptation in the Southern High Plains of the United States illustrates how PAR complements formal science and can contribute to community resilience and adaptation efforts. Synthesized into 10 entry points for more ethical and participatory science, our semi-chronological narrative offers concrete strategies informed by PAR principles and values, at various stages of research, and highlights the place-based, ethical, and methodological contexts for applying each strategy.