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Moving beyond mainstream ‘residual realist’ perspectives of participation as discrete, specific and pre-given, constructivist STS scholarship sees participation, publics and public issues as co-produced through the performance of collective practices that interrelate in wider systems. Work on remaking participation in STS, and specifically within UKERC’s Public Engagement Observatory, has developed the theoretical basis for an ‘ecologies of participation’ approach that conceptualises participation as co-produced through diverse situated collective practices, which interrelate and circulate in wider trans-local spaces of controversy and standardisation, and become stabilised in constitutional settings, such as nation states or other spaces of coherence above and below the state.

In a ‘re-making and doing’ demonstration organised by the UKERC Public Engagement Observatory at the EASST-4S 2024 Conference on Thursday 18th July 2024, Observatory members Jason Chilvers, Helen Pallett, Phedeas Stephanides, Elliot Honeybun-Arnolda and a team of affiliated PhD students (Marina Nicolaidou and Olivia Thompson), showcased different methods developed to map ecologies of participation with technoscience and democracy. Specifically, the team provided working demonstrations of methods for mapping participation, publics and publics issues developed in the UKERC Public Engagement Observatory, namely comparative case analysis, digital methods, and crowdsourcing through citizen social science. We invited participants to openly and reflexively engage with these methods for mapping the many different ways that publics are engaging with energy, climate change and net zero. This prompted open consideration of the comparative differences between these methods for mapping ecologies of participation, including their different entry points, unavoidable exclusions, uncertainties, and their potentials to transform technoscience, democracy and participation in practice by opening up the evidence base of policy-making, innovation, and deliberation.