Tackling society’s most urgent challenges

Academics will investigate how citizens, civil society organisations and policymakers are collaborating to tackle some of society’s most pressing problems.

WISERD has secured £1.6m of funding from the UKRI Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) for the three-year research programme, ‘People, Places, and the Public Sphere’.

The programme will examine ways in which people’s participation in democratic activities, collaborative governance and citizen science can address urgent collective challenges.

The programme comprises four research themes:

Workplaces and participatory democracy will focus on the Fair Work Agenda, including Wales’s progress in moving towards being a Fair Work Nation.
Rights, refugees and marginalised communities will examine the role of civil society organisations in supporting refugees and state surveillance of Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities.
Collaborative governance and deliberative politics will look at new and innovative ways to support the collaborative engagement of citizens in policymaking and to counter polarisation.
Local economies and place-based innovations will explore ways of involving economic actors in developing local leadership, resilience and capital to support economic growth.
These themes will be supported by the development of a place-based and public-facing WISERD Data Lab. This will support community-led data collection to enable citizens, communities, and policymakers to play their part in co-production projects.

The results of this research will contribute to policy and practices that fully enable citizen participation, deepen engagement with citizen science, and ultimately, enable local communities to mobilise assets and resources in response to social, economic, political, and environmental challenges. WISERD will also continue to expand its international and civil society research networks.