Jesse Hamilton

There have been increasing calls to improve the integration of local expertise into both scientific research and evidence-based policy development, especially for urgent problems like climate change. There are both epistemic and ethical benefits of better involving local communities in these knowledge-generating processes. Here we present a community science process model for integrating the expertise of local communities, developed through field analysis of a community science endeavor in the Galápagos Islands. We call this kind of collaboration “embedded ecology.” The process of embedded ecology is modeled by what we call the Partnership Flywheel, which includes phases for ideation, planning, implementation, and learning. The importance of sustained collaboration between external practitioners and a local community cannot be overstated, which is one reason the flywheel is iterative, allowing the focus to be on sustained project generation and improvement. After discussing the practical elements of the Partnership Flywheel process model, we argue that its simplicity and replicability are essential for any process model aimed at improving the integration of local expertise in community science, thereby addressing both current and enduring challenges in the field. In sum, we present and explore a new community science process model thus advancing a recently growing literature on the theory of participatory research.

We take up the challenge of developing an international network with capacity to survey the world’s scientists on an ongoing basis, providing rich datasets regarding the opinions of scientists and scientific sub-communities, both at a time and also over time. The novel methodology employed sees local coordinators, at each institution in the network, sending survey invitation emails internally to scientists at their home institution. The emails link to a ‘10 second survey’, where the participant is presented with a single statement to consider, and a standard five-point Likert scale. In June 2023, a group of 30 philosophers and social scientists invited 20,085 scientists across 30 institutions in 12 countries to participate, gathering 6,807 responses to the statement Science has put it beyond reasonable doubt that COVID-19 is caused by a virus. The study demonstrates that it is possible to establish a global network to quickly ascertain scientific opinion on a large international scale, with high response rate, low opt-out rate, and in a way that allows for significant (perhaps indefinite) repeatability. Measuring scientific opinion in this new way would be a valuable complement to currently available approaches, potentially informing policy decisions and public understanding across diverse fields.