Article: Sherry Arnstein's Ladder of Citizen Participation

During the lectures on both the Shirk et al and the Haklay typologies, you may notice several mentions of Sherry Arnstein's "Ladder of Participation". This is a 1969 paper called "A Ladder of Citizen Participation" in the Journal of the American Institute of Planners on the subject of participatory decision making. It is not open access, but you can read about it on Wikipedia.

An adapted visualisation of the "ladder of participation" is here:

This work has been influential not only in citizen science but areas such as public policy, geography, planning, education, youth engagement and community projects.

Arnstein's ladder is simple and easy to use, and was also deliberately designed to be provocative. It focuses on political power relationships, uses value-laden terms and offers a strong value judgment, with the top - full citizen control - being the ideal and the aim. All lower degrees of participation are depicted as worthy of criticism.

In citizen science, there are certainly different degrees of citizen participation and control, but in typology such as Haklay's levels of participation, these do not contain these value judgments. Every citizen science project is different, and while some are suitable for a high level of participation, others are not. Every citizen science volunteer, too, will have their own preferences and aptitudes about what kind of level of participation they are comfortable within citizen science. So a citizen science project with little or no decision-making by the citizen scientist is not better nor worse than a project in which the citizen and scientist have equal power, or one in which the scientist has more power. So while the ladder is extremely useful to us and to many other fields, not all citizen science projects have to be citizen-led.