Participatory Science and Research as an Expression of a Swiss Culture of Cooperation
Participatory Science ; participatory research ; international cooperation ; Switzerland ; science diplomacy ; subsidiarity ; federalism ; direct democracy ; development ; citizen participation ; International Geneva.
Participatory Science and Research are neither a Swiss invention nor a method specific to Swiss foreign policy. They nevertheless display a remarkable affinity with several principles that Switzerland claims as central to its political organisation, international action and development cooperation: participation, subsidiarity, power-sharing, local autonomy, dialogue, the search for inclusive solutions, innovation, stability and multilateralism.
This convergence does not relate solely to values. It also concerns a way of organising action: distributing responsibilities, recognising the skills and expertise present within territories, involving the people concerned in producing solutions, and building mechanisms capable of operating across several scales without depriving local actors of their autonomy.
Applied to development cooperation, Participatory Science and Research can therefore be seen as a particularly coherent operational translation of principles deeply associated with the functioning of the Swiss political system. They offer a form of scientific cooperation that no longer consists solely in producing knowledge about territories or for populations, but in increasing the capacity of territories and populations to produce, discuss and use for themselves the knowledge necessary for their development.
1. A very strong affinity of principles
It would be excessive to claim that Participatory Science and Research are, by nature, a Swiss practice. Their history is international, their forms are diverse, and their intellectual traditions belong to very different scientific, social and political contexts.
The relevance of drawing a parallel with Switzerland lies here in the values and strategies that have been developed.
The Confederation’s Foreign Policy Strategy 2024-2027 notably describes Switzerland through concepts of dialogue, inclusive solutions, power-sharing, subsidiarity, stability and innovation [1]. Democracy, good governance, peace, human rights, sustainability and multilateralism are also part of the framework within which Switzerland presents its foreign policy [2].
Genuinely participatory research is based precisely on several of these principles.
It distributes certain research functions among several categories of actors. It recognises the existence of situated knowledge. It organises dialogue between different forms of expertise. It enables local actors to contribute to identifying a problem, producing data, interpreting them and, depending on the mechanism, designing responses.
There is therefore less an identity between « Swiss values » and « participatory science » than a structural affinity between two ways of organising collective action.
This distinction is important. It makes it possible to move beyond a superficial cultural comparison and examine the mechanisms themselves.
2. From direct democracy to participation in knowledge production
One of the most visible characteristics of the Swiss political system lies in the role given to direct citizen participation. Switzerland’s institutional presentation emphasises the role of direct democracy and the instruments that allow the population to intervene regularly in public decision-making [3].
The comparison with Participatory Science and Research obviously does not consist in confusing political decision-making with scientific activity. The criteria for validating scientific knowledge are not those of a popular vote.
The affinity lies in another principle: a person concerned by a collective issue is not necessarily reduced to the role of recipient of a decision or of expertise produced elsewhere.
In a participatory mechanism, citizens can observe an environment, collect data, contribute to formulating a question, document a situation, participate in interpreting results or take part in designing an intervention.
A shift therefore occurs that is comparable to the one characterising participatory democracy: citizens are no longer merely informed after knowledge has been produced; they can be involved in certain stages of its production.
This logic takes on particular importance in development cooperation.
The traditional vocabulary of cooperation has long distinguished between donors, experts, operators and beneficiaries. Participatory research makes it possible to alter this architecture. A population affected by a problem relating to water, biodiversity, agriculture, environmental health or natural resource management can become a producer of part of the knowledge on which action will be based.
Participation is then no longer merely a form of consultation. It becomes a component of the project’s knowledge infrastructure.
3. Subsidiarity: producing and acting at the most relevant level
The principle of subsidiarity occupies an important place in Switzerland’s federal organisation. It assumes that responsibilities should be exercised, as far as possible, at the level capable of assuming them, rather than being systematically transferred to a higher authority [4].
The Federal Office of Justice also describes federalism as an organisation that enables communities to retain autonomy while ensuring their integration within a common whole [5].
Participatory Science and Research offer a particularly clear translation of this principle into the field of knowledge.
An observation can be made by a resident. A series of observations can be organised by a local association. Their analysis can involve a university. Their comparison may require a national or international network. Their political use may fall within the remit of a local authority, a State or a multilateral organisation.
Not all functions need to be concentrated in the same place.
This architecture makes it possible to design knowledge systems in which the international level does not replace the local level, but provides it with additional capacities: common methods, comparison, expertise, digital infrastructure, funding or institutional recognition.
In development cooperation, this approach profoundly changes the relationship between external expertise and local capacity.
It is no longer a matter of automatically assuming that relevant knowledge must flow down from an international institution to the field. Part of that knowledge can instead be produced in the field and then connected to broader scientific systems.
Cooperation then becomes an organisation of the circulation of knowledge across scales.
4. Federalism as a model for distributed networks
Federal logic is not based solely on decentralisation. It allows several entities to retain their identity and certain competences while belonging to a common architecture.
This characteristic has a direct equivalent in many participatory science projects.
A water-monitoring programme can bring together schools, local authorities, associations, laboratories and administrations distributed across several catchment areas. Each can produce observations locally. Common protocols nevertheless make it possible to compare and aggregate them.
The same principle can be applied to biodiversity, soils, climate, pollution, landscapes or other scientific subjects.
The value of this architecture for international cooperation is considerable. It avoids two opposite pitfalls: absolute fragmentation, in which each initiative remains isolated, and excessive centralisation, in which an international actor imposes its tools, categories and operating methods on the entire network.
Between these two extremes, a federative model emerges: locally autonomous actors connected through common standards, tools, objectives and spaces for cooperation.
This way of designing an international scientific programme has an obvious affinity with the Swiss search for unity compatible with diversity.
5. From power-sharing to sharing authority over knowledge
The concept of power-sharing is explicitly among the characteristics highlighted in Switzerland’s Foreign Policy Strategy [6].
This concept takes on a particular meaning when applied to research.
Producing knowledge is never an operation entirely separate from power relations. Defining the questions to be studied, selecting relevant data, determining the categories used, interpreting results and deciding how they will be used confers considerable capacity for action on the people and institutions that control these operations.
Participatory research can redistribute part of this capacity.
It leads to several questions:
- Who defines the problem?
- Who chooses what should be observed?
- Who produces the data?
- Who can access them?
- Who interprets them?
- Who decides on possible uses of the results?
- Who ultimately has the capacities needed to continue the work?
In the context of international cooperation, these questions are particularly important because asymmetries in resources between donors, scientific institutions, operators and local communities are often considerable.
One of the major contributions of participatory research can consist precisely in partially rebalancing the power to produce and use knowledge.
This does not mean eliminating scientific expertise or considering all forms of knowledge to be equivalent. It means distinguishing scientific rigour from the institutional concentration of scientific power.
A method can be rigorous while remaining open to participation.
6. Dialogue, compromise and constructive confrontation between forms of knowledge
Swiss politics places particular importance on dialogue and on seeking solutions that are inclusive enough to be supported by different actors. The functioning of the Federal Council itself is based on an institutional culture of seeking common solutions rather than on a permanent logic of majority confrontation [7].
Participatory Science and Research require a similar capacity.
They bring together actors who speak neither the same language nor from the same position: researchers, residents, farmers, teachers, civil servants, companies, associations, local authorities or international organisations.
Their cooperation requires different demands to be made compatible.
Scientists must be able to maintain the conditions required for a robust protocol. Participants must understand what they are doing and why. Local actors must be able to connect the research to a real problem. Public organisations must have usable data. Communities must be able to recognise their experience in the way the problem is framed.
Scientific participation is therefore not the erasure of differences. It constitutes an organised mechanism for productive confrontation between different forms of knowledge, interests and responsibilities.
This characteristic brings it close to a culture of compromise that does not necessarily seek uniformity, but rather the possibility of building common action despite the plurality of positions.
7. Recognising diversity without abandoning scientific requirements
Switzerland was politically constructed around the coexistence of different communities, languages, traditions and minorities. Its federal organisation helps precisely to make this plurality compatible with the existence of common institutions [8].
A similar issue arises in knowledge production.
A researcher possesses scientific and methodological expertise. A farmer possesses in-depth experience of their soils. A community may possess a memory of the territory accumulated over several generations. A manager knows the institutional constraints. A resident can document everyday phenomena that remain invisible during a one-off scientific campaign.
Recognising this diversity does not imply considering all statements to be scientifically equivalent.
The function of rigorous participatory research is precisely to create the conditions for collecting, distinguishing, testing, confronting and articulating different forms of knowledge.
In development cooperation, this capacity is essential. It limits the risk that an international programme will interpret a territory solely through categories constructed outside it.
It also enables groups that are usually distant from scientific institutions to participate in describing the problems that concern them.
8. From beneficiary to actor: autonomy and local ownership
The approaches of the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation give significant importance to partner participation, capacity development and the adaptation of interventions to local contexts [9].
This orientation constitutes one of the most direct points of convergence with participatory research.
In a conventional approach, an international scientific project can intervene in a territory, produce data, publish results and leave. The territory has been studied without necessarily increasing its own capacity to produce knowledge.
Participatory research makes it possible to introduce another evaluation criterion.
At the end of the project, are there more people capable of using the protocol?
Do local actors have the necessary instruments?
Can they access the data?
Do they understand how the data are produced?
Can they continue certain observations?
Have relationships been created between local authorities, scientists, citizens and field organisations?
Does institutional capacity remain after external funding has ended?
From this perspective, the success of scientific cooperation is no longer measured solely by the quantity of knowledge produced. It is also measured by the knowledge capacity that remains within the territory.
This evolution brings participatory research and capacity development very close together.
An SDC document devoted to the latter also emphasises the importance of local skills, partnerships and a donor posture that avoids permanently substituting itself for the actors it seeks to strengthen [10].
9. Participation as an infrastructure for good governance
Scientific participation does not only produce knowledge. It can also change the conditions under which public decision-making takes place.
When a community is able to regularly measure the quality of a river, changes in a forest, air pollution or a transformation of its environment, it acquires a new capacity to engage in dialogue with an administration, an operator or a decision-maker.
Data become a form of mediation between lived experience and public decision-making.
The SDC itself supports participation and citizen-monitoring approaches aimed at strengthening transparency and accountability [11].
Participatory Science and Research can extend this logic when governance issues depend on phenomena that need to be observed, measured or documented.
They then give citizens not only a voice, but also the means to produce factual elements that can enter into collective discussion.
This function obviously guarantees neither agreement nor good decisions. It can, however, increase actors’ capacity to discuss matters on the basis of a shared documented object.
10. From trust to the production of a common factual basis
Trust is a central resource in relations between institutions, communities and territories.
Yet in many situations involving development or natural resource management, disagreements also concern the facts.
Is water quality really deteriorating?
Which activity contributes to pollution?
Is biodiversity declining?
Is a public intervention producing the announced results?
When data are produced exclusively by one of the parties, their legitimacy may be challenged by the others.
Participatory research can sometimes shift the issue. Different actors can participate in designing the protocol, understand the methods used and contribute to collecting observations.
They do not necessarily come to agree on their interests or on the solution to adopt. They can nevertheless share a more broadly accepted factual basis.
This characteristic is of major interest in the fields of water, agriculture, biodiversity, management of common resources or the transboundary environment.
11. Participatory Science, good offices and science diplomacy
Switzerland places particular importance on peace promotion, dialogue and good offices in its foreign policy. The Foreign Policy Strategy 2024-2027 also mentions science diplomacy among the instruments that can contribute to international relations [12].
Caution is required here.
Participatory research does not, by itself, resolve a political conflict. The joint production of data does not erase divergent interests or power relations.
It can nevertheless provide a space for cooperation around an issue concrete enough to enable relationships between actors who find it difficult to cooperate on other subjects.
A river basin, animal migration, pollution, a forest resource or a climate phenomenon can cross several borders. Observing them sometimes requires a continuity that political boundaries do not easily allow.
Transboundary participatory science can then create a relational infrastructure: common protocols, training, data exchanges, meetings, mixed teams and communities of practice.
Scientific knowledge in this case becomes a field of cooperation before potentially becoming a field of negotiation.
Participatory Science and Research could thus occupy a particular place within the continuum of science diplomacy: a science diplomacy conducted not only between research institutions or governments, but also rooted in populations and territories.
12. A multilateralism connecting institutions with territories
Switzerland supports multilateralism and places particular importance on Geneva’s role in international governance [13].
Participatory Science and Research offer an interesting possibility for complementing this institutional multilateralism.
International organisations work mainly with States, institutions, experts and representative organisations. Participatory networks make it possible to connect these structures with a much larger number of territorial actors: universities, cities, associations, schools, communities, citizens or field managers.
It then becomes possible to imagine a multilevel form of multilateralism.
International organisations can provide common frameworks.
Universities contribute methods.
States create the regulatory conditions.
Local authorities organise territorial action.
Associations mobilise participants.
Citizens produce certain observations.
Data flow upwards towards national and international systems, while knowledge and resources flow back down towards the territories.
It is therefore no longer only a matter of connecting States with one another, but of connecting the different scales of the same global issue.
This characteristic makes Participatory Science and Research particularly relevant to International Geneva, many of whose fields of action — environment, health, climate, development, peace, human rights — depend precisely on the capacity to connect international standards with realities on the ground.
13. Environment and responsibility towards the commons
The preservation of natural resources is among the objectives associated with Swiss foreign policy [14].
It is also one of the fields in which participatory science is most immediately applicable.
Citizen participation makes it possible to considerably increase observation capacities: multiplying measurement points, repeating observations over time, and covering territories that are difficult to monitor exclusively through professional scientific teams.
But its value goes beyond the quantity of data produced.
Regularly observing an environment creates a particular relationship with it.
A person who monitors a river, soil, an animal population or a landscape over several years acquires knowledge and often a greater capacity to perceive ongoing transformations.
Producing data can therefore potentially become a form of territorial responsibility.
In a cooperation programme, citizens are no longer merely made aware of the environment through a message designed by an institution. They become among those who help to make transformations of that environment visible.
Participatory science can thus connect knowledge, education, capacity for action and management of the commons.
14. Innovation and distributed experimentation
Innovation is among the characteristics that Switzerland’s foreign policy strategy associates with the country’s positioning [15].
Participatory research can contribute to a particular form of innovation: distributed experimentation.
When a network includes many relatively autonomous territories, each context can test certain adaptations, methods or uses. Solutions that work can then be documented, compared and transferred.
This model is particularly suited to international cooperation.
Since social, ecological and institutional contexts differ, replicating a programme identically rarely produces the same effects everywhere.
A participatory architecture, by contrast, makes it possible to maintain a common methodological core while allowing significant local adaptation.
Innovation therefore no longer comes solely from a centre that designs and then disseminates a solution. It can also emerge from the peripheries and circulate horizontally between territories.
15. Stability through ownership rather than dependence
Stability is also among the concepts highlighted in Swiss foreign policy [16].
Applied to cooperation, this concept can be understood not only in a political sense, but also in terms of the sustainability of the mechanisms put in place.
A project in which all skills, instruments, data and decisions remain concentrated with the external operator becomes vulnerable when that operator leaves the territory.
By contrast, a programme that gradually develops the capacities of several local actors may retain some of its functions after the initial funding disappears.
Participation can therefore become a possible condition for institutional resilience.
It is no longer merely a value.
It becomes a technology for sustaining action over time.
16. Solidarity based on the capacity to act
Development cooperation has historically been based on a logic of solidarity. Swiss foreign policy places its action in particular within the framework of reducing poverty and hardship, promoting human rights, peace and the peaceful coexistence of peoples [17].
Participatory Science and Research make it possible to introduce an additional requirement into this solidarity: helping without rendering unnecessary the capacity for action of those being helped.
From this perspective, the desired progression is no longer merely:
assistance → service provision.
It can become:
assistance → participation → competence → partnership → autonomy.
External aid sometimes remains indispensable. It can provide funding, equipment, expertise, institutional access or infrastructure.
But its objective can be designed in such a way that a growing share of functions is gradually assumed by actors within the territory.
Scientific participation then becomes consistent with a conception of cooperation in which solidarity and autonomy are not opposed.
17. Reciprocity as a principle of scientific cooperation
The relationship between international expertise and local knowledge is not necessarily unidirectional.
A Swiss university or organisation can provide a method, protocol, network or technology. But the local partner possesses what the external actor does not: detailed knowledge of the field, continuity of observation, social understanding of the context, relational networks, memory of the territory and the ability to interpret certain situations.
Participatory research can therefore potentially transform cooperation into a relationship of mutual learning.
In its documents devoted to capacity development, the SDC emphasises the importance of partnerships and of a relatively modest posture on the part of external actors [18].
This reciprocity is probably one of the most important elements distinguishing participatory scientific cooperation from a simple international scientific service.
The partner is not merely the person or institution to which a method is applied.
It becomes the person or institution with which knowledge is constructed.
18. Historical continuity with certain Swiss conceptions of decentralisation
The connection between the Swiss approach to cooperation and decentralised organisation is not merely a contemporary interpretation.
A document devoted to decentralisation in Swiss bilateral cooperation already highlighted the importance given to participation, local resources, needs expressed at the local level and collaboration with local organisations. It explicitly drew a parallel with the Swiss tradition of subsidiarity and with a conception of the State built from the bottom up [19].
This point gives the comparison with Participatory Science and Research particular depth.
Participatory Science and Research can be regarded as an extension of this logic into the field of knowledge.
If subsidiarity implies that action should be carried out at the closest level capable of assuming it, scientific subsidiarity could mean that knowledge production should also be distributed down to the closest level capable of reliably carrying out part of it.
Professional researchers remain indispensable for certain functions.
But they do not need to perform every function.
A school can observe, while an association can coordinate, a community can identify a question, a university can validate a protocol, a laboratory can carry out certain analyses, an international organisation can harmonise indicators, and an administration can integrate the results into public decision-making.
This architecture does not necessarily reduce scientific rigour. It distributes differently the responsibilities required to meet that rigour.
19. Towards a Swiss conception of participatory scientific cooperation
Taken separately, each of these parallels might seem relatively general. Many countries support participation, innovation, dialogue or good governance.
The value of the approach becomes apparent when they are considered simultaneously.
Participatory Science and Research combine:
- citizen participation ;
- distribution of responsibilities ;
- autonomy of local actors ;
- cooperation between several levels ;
- recognition of the diversity of knowledge ;
- production of a common framework ;
- dialogue between different interests ;
- capacity development ;
- transparency ;
- distributed innovation ;
- the pursuit of sustainability ;
- international cooperation ;
- connections between territories and global institutions.
Taken together, these elements display a distinctive affinity with the political and diplomatic architecture Switzerland itself uses to describe its system: participatory democracy, federalism, subsidiarity, power-sharing, dialogue, inclusive solutions, stability, innovation and multilateralism.
It therefore becomes possible to formulate a more ambitious hypothesis.
Participatory Science and Research could constitute one of the most coherent contemporary forms of a Swiss approach to international scientific cooperation.
Not because they are exclusively Swiss.
Not because Switzerland holds an intellectual or historical monopoly over them.
But because they make it possible to translate into operational methods several principles that already structure its political organisation and international action.
20. From scientific cooperation to a diplomacy of participation through science
Science diplomacy generally refers to the relationships between science and foreign policy: scientific cooperation between States, the mobilisation of expertise in international relations, or the use of science as a space for dialogue.
Participatory Science and Research make it possible to add another dimension.
They enable a form of science diplomacy that no longer connects only governments, international organisations and universities, but also local authorities, associations, schools and citizens.
This approach could be described as a diplomacy of participation through science.
It would be particularly well suited to Switzerland’s position.
A country of limited size can hardly build its international influence on demographic or military power. It can, however, help to build methods, institutions, spaces for dialogue and infrastructures that enable different actors to cooperate.
From this perspective, Swiss added value would not necessarily consist in becoming the centre that produces all knowledge.
It could consist in becoming one of the places where the architectures enabling many others to produce knowledge together are designed and organised.
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Participatory Science and Research should therefore not be presented as merely a technique for science communication or as an economical way of increasing the number of available observers.
Their scope is potentially much broader.
They propose an organisation of knowledge in which participation, subsidiarity, local autonomy, the sharing of certain responsibilities, the confrontation of forms of knowledge, cooperation between levels and capacity development are integrated into the method itself.
This is precisely what makes it possible to connect them with several principles strongly associated with Switzerland.
In the field of development cooperation, this convergence becomes particularly significant.
Switzerland applies to its own political functioning a principle according to which the people and territories concerned must have a genuine capacity to participate in the conduct of affairs that affect them. Participatory Science and Research apply a comparable principle to knowledge production: the people and territories affected by a problem can contribute to describing it, understanding it and building the means to act upon it.
As such, their development within international cooperation could be understood not as the importation of a new fashionable method, but as the extension, into the scientific field, of a political culture already familiar to Switzerland.
A culture of participation rather than centralisation.
Of subsidiarity rather than substitution.
Of partnership rather than assistance alone.
Of supported autonomy rather than dependence.
Of dialogue rather than imposition.
And, at the international level, of the patient construction of institutions that enable different actors to jointly produce the knowledge they need in order to act.