Exploring the afterlives of environmental citizen science projects in Latin America

Derived from their current popularity in public and scientific discourse, citizen science projects tend to receive a lot of attention during their planning and initial implementation. This is especially true for environmentally focused projects. Citizen science is usually portrayed as a key tool to allow citizens to gain a deeper understanding and/or start acting regarding the local effects of environmental degradation, from assessing industrial pollution to enacting small-scale restoration initiatives. It is usually assumed that after implementation, when the organizing scientists leave and/or funding runs out, these projects will continue somehow or at least serve as catalyzers for new local initiatives. However, very little research has been done exploring the critical issue of sustainability and the impact for the local communities involved. The afterlives of citizen science projects remain a largely unexplored territory in STS and public engagement in science. We present early insights from an ongoing project analyzing the afterlives of several environmental citizen science projects carried out in Latin America in the last decade. Instead of the promised path of growing engagement, our findings show how these projects tend to develop something like zombie lives after scientists leave; being neither death nor alive. This outcome severely diminishes citizens’ potential to enact substantive processes of local transformation. Exploring the situated afterlives of these projects and how citizens (can) make do with their remainders, we provide insights into multiple forms of zombie lives of citizen science projects. This will help us think about how we can do such projects otherwise.