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This open access book provides novel insights into the field, exploring the potential for the 'sensing citizens' to concretely influence risk governance by filling - intentional or accidental - official informational gaps. Grassroots-driven environmental monitoring based on own senses or on sensor technology, i.e., 'citizen sensing', can be considered a constructive response to crises. When lay people distrust official information or just want to fill data gaps, they may resort to sensors and data infrastructures to visualize, monitor, and report risks caused by environmental factors to public health. Although through a possible initial conflict, citizen sensing may ultimately have the potential to contribute to institutional risk governance. Citizen sensing proves to be a practice able to address governance challenges with the way data over an (environmental) risk problem are gathered and provided to the public. This essentially unveils the issue of a perceived legitimacy gap in current (environmental) risk governance. Nonetheless, it also opens avenues for a more inclusive and transparent governmental response to pressing and complex risks, affecting first and foremost local people.
Anna Berti Suman is tenured Assistant Professor in Environmental Sociology at the University of Padua. She was Senior Researcher in Sustainable Innovation Law at Luiss University, Rome, and she served as Head of Research at the Laboratory for the Governance of the Commons (2025-2023). She was Marie Sklodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship grantee and Dutch Research Council postdoctoral fellow at the European Commission's Joint Research Centre, Ispra (2023-2020). She founded the "Sensing for Justice" project aimed at exploring civic monitoring for environmental law enforcement. She is Qualified Barrister, following climate and environmental litigation for various NGOs. She obtained her PhD in Environmental Law & Technology in 2020 from the Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology & Society. She published impactful peer-reviewed articles, policy briefs and books. She is often invited to present her results in international scientific venues. In 2025, she obtained a competitive ?1.3 million grant for the project "PersoNa - Personal Narratives in climate litigation" awarded by the Italian Science Fund.
Chapter 1 - Introduction.- Chapter 2 - The concepts of public and environmental health risk governance: hidden controversies in apparently plain notions.- Chapter 3 - Identifying dominant models of environmental health risk governance.-Chapter 4 - Hypothesizing a new approach to risk governance based on citizen sensing.-Chapter 5 - Conclusion.
