2026-10-06 –, Room 1 Language: English
Public trust in environmental science in the Netherlands is strained, for example in the ongoing nitrogen and climate change debates, with parts of the public questioning the legitimacy of scientific knowledge (Hill & Weulen Kranenbarg, 2025). Citizen science (CS) is often seen as a way to strengthen public trust science, yet it remains unclear how it can fulfil this promise exactly (Brouwer & Hessels, 2019).
Participation in CS projects can reduce psychological distance to science (Rutjens & Hornsey, 2025), which in turn can increase trust (Skarlatidou et al., 2024). But evidence so far largely concerns direct participants (Finger et al., 2023). Little is known about whether this effect extends to non-participants who are aware that other citizens have participated. Some studies suggest such a spillover (Bedessem et al., 2021), but the evidence is limited. Theoretically, it remains plausible: social proximity is a key factor in reducing science skepticism (Vegt et al., 2025). When science feels closer to someone, it may also feel more relevant and trustworthy. Yet CS participation is often skewed toward citizens with higher education and existing trust (Sauermann et al., 2020). For CS to promote equity, it must also build trust among groups more distant from science.
In this presentation, we would like to present a new research project in which we will explore how citizen science (CS) can contribute to trust and equity, focussing on environmental science in the Netherlands. The project will start in September 2026 and is funded by Open Science NL. The project examines how citizen participation shapes trust not only among participants but also among non-participating citizens, scientists, and stakeholders. In the study we pay special attention to those who historically experience a large psychological distance to science.
Building on STS literature, we study trust relationships in a symmetrical way, exploring not only trust of citizens, but also trust of scientists and knowledge users in CS practices. We will distinguish analytically between trust in the scientific method, trust in scientific researchers and trust in scientific results.
Our research questions are:
1. How does the participation of citizens in an environmental research activity influence the trust that other citizens (in the environment of the activity, but not directly involved) have in this activity, in particular citizens with a large psychological distance to science?
2. How does the participation of citizens in an environmental research activity influence the trust that other scientists (in the same field of research, but not directly involved) have in this activity?
3. How does the participation of citizens in an environmental research activity influence the trust that stakeholders (such as policy makers that can potentially use the research results) have in this activity?
4. Which characteristics of citizen science projects influence trust of different actors, including non-participating citizens?
Our research strategy combines qualitative and quantitative methods. In our analysis we will compare four selected CS projects in the Netherlands, to explore causal relationships. For this project we will select four cases of CS projects under the umbrella of the ‘Measuring Together’ (‘Samen Meten’) platform of RIVM and/or the Citizen Science Nederland (CS-NL) Network. Conditions for inclusion are a focus on environmental science, ongoing projects and willingness of project leaders to provide access to relevant data. To allow for comparable analysis, we vary the cases in two dimensions:
• initiative: driven by citizens or by researchers
• issue at stake: direct relevance for citizens (related to local environmental problems, directly affecting people’s lives) or indirect concern (broader environmental issues). This probably relates to the level of contestation.
Our main methods are:
• Exploratory interviews with project leaders of CS projects, to map the project context, clarify intended outcomes, and identify relevant social and institutional factors that may influence trust in science.
• Survey among non-participating citizens who live in direct proximity of the research activities, with a short description/visualization of the projects and items on psychological distance to and trust in science
• Focus-groups with non-participating citizens who live in direct proximity of the research activities, to gain more clarity on how they view these projects and how that relates to their trust
• Interviews with non-participating scientific researchers about their perspectives on the CS projects
• Interviews with stakeholders, such as policy makers about their perspectives on the CS projects (
During the conference we hope to collect feedback on our theoretical positioning, sampling strategy and methodology, in order to improve the research design of the project.
Kirsten Vegt is a PhD candidate at Leiden University and the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM) in the Netherlands. Her research explores the intersection of psychological distance to and trust in science, and the social robustness of policy-relevant environmental science through citizen engagement.
Rathenau Instituut & Leiden University
Anne-Floor Scholvinck is a senior researcher at the Rathenau Instituut, based in The Hague (the Netherlands). She specialises in public trust in science, public involvement in science, and evidence-informed policy.
Anne-Floor wrote her PhD-thesis on patient involvement in health research decision-making, which she defended at the VU Amsterdam in 2018. In 2020-2021, Anne-Floor was seconded to the UNESCO headquarters in Paris. As an Open Science expert, she contributed to drafting the global UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science, which has been adopted by the member states in November 2021.