Can Citizens' Science Rescue Participatory Budgeting?

One of the major weaknesses of participatory budgeting processes is the monitoring phase that tracks the fate of approved projects. Establishing a monitoring mechanism that can open the city's procurement and implementation system has significant political and technical challenges. On top of that many believe that citizens do not have the interest nor the capacity to conduct the research that is necessary to implement effective monitoring. Hence in the majority of PB processes the participatory monitoring phase is superficial, inefficient and ineffective. However the literature on citizens-science offers numerous cases in which monitoring mechanisms were implemented by crowd-sourcing small low effort activities from a large number of passionate hobbyists. Most applications in citizens science focus on the natural science (e.g. mapping galaxies, mapping bird migrations), but more recently there is a growing number of pilots that attempt to leverage citizens science and new technologies to investigate city level issues. Using the experience gathered in one of such attempts, the citizens science project on Recycling in Southampton (UK), we explore the feasibility of adapting the model to the monitoring phase in hybrid PB processes. Can citizens science come to the rescue of PB?