This project aimed to explore whether and (if so) how individuals affected by climate change experience and perceive empowerment through digital crowdsourcing campaigns provided by organisational actors. Unequal inclusion in climate change debates and decision-making processes remains a significant global problem, perpetuating local and global structural inequalities in experiencing and addressing climate change. In response to this issue, various international non-governmental civil society (INGO) and governmental organisations (IGO) have initiated crowdsourcing campaigns to involve citizens around the globe. Such campaigns provide open calls through digital platforms with varying aims around participation, ranging from individual submissions of climate change data (e.g. photo evidence or disaster tracking) to group submissions of innovative solutions to specific environmental problems. As such, these campaigns aim to provide participatory processes. They should therefore, in theory, empower individuals through more participatory digitally-enabled processes (= digital empowerment), a notion and hypothesis this project aimed to test through the lens of climate justice. In particular, the project sought to explore how digital empowerment is understood in theory and practice (RQ1), how crowdsourcing participants viewed and assessed these initiatives’ capacity to empower, and whether they consequently experience them as empowering (RQ2).
This project is focused on empowerment in theory (= concept) and practice (= experience). It does, however, speak to wider issues around democracy, such as: (1) processes of democratisation: through its focus on empowering unequally engaged communities, and (2) digital divides (= the gulf between developed & developing regions in digital technology usage and skills): through its questioning of whether crowdsourcing empowers communities that are already privileged (thus empowered) in their access to digital technologies. The climate justice frame specifically addresses social and political injustices such as unequal and therefore undemocratic global involvement in climate change debates, issues that could in theory be addressed through empowering practices. Thus, while these significant global social problems did not lie within the scope of this specific project, there are clear links to these wider issues, and the project results were therefore applied in a way that they would speak to these debates, for example through discussions of digital empowerment theory in relation to digital-visual misogyny in climate cases and Global North-South relationships in research. This project addresses these issues by exploring whether and (if so) how individuals affected by climate change experience and perceive empowerment through efforts to “gain control” (socially, politically, or otherwise) of their own living conditions by engaging in digital crowdsourcing activities offered by INGO in the Global North with a climate change priority. To do so, this project drew on qualitative research with case study organisations WWF and Greenpeace.
