Étude comparée des dispositifs participatifs du Muséum national d'histoire naturelle?

The project "Participation for Naturalist Knowledge Production" funded by the "Museum's Thematic Actions" program, aimed to foster exchanges between scientists engaged in participatory research projects in relation with environmental management. This collective work was prompted by a challenge i.e. producing the conditions for an open discussion between practitioners from different research fields and disciplines, and crossing over the boundaries of specific networks, territories and analytic frameworks. Our aim was in particular to question the current opposition between "crowdsourcing" and "community based" approaches. This work was funded in 2014 and 2015 by a "Thematic Action" of the French National Museum of Natural History and resulted in seminars and the production of a web-documentary. Various regions and scales were concerned. The experiences presented included participatory cartography projects in relation with protected area creation or territorial claims; amateur practices in taxonomy and ecology; implementation of large scale monitoring devices concerning biodiversity and water management. Moreover different analytical practices coexisted, from autonomous reflexive approaches to ethnographies conducted by other researchers. The richness of the debate demonstrated the interest of this collective reflexive work. Finally, this work showed that the different research projects faced similar problems with, however, a strong convergence on different issues: motivations for engaging in a participative approach, data analysis and validation, device optimization, and knowledge and power asymmetries.