Intensifying research on regional decarbonization through citizen participation and communication: Insights from a Japanese case study

Technological development and academic research play decisive roles in fostering regional decarbonization and tackling the negative impacts and outcomes of climate change on society and natural environments. However, due to their different interests and views, disagreements remain between academic researchers and citizens. To bridge the gap, researchers should gain an appropriate understanding of the views of citizens regarding academic research, and citizens should provide constructive attitudes/responses toward academia. This study aimed to examine the major characteristics of citizens’ perspectives of and possible contributions to research on regional decarbonization. We carried out action research in the form of a participatory workshop to collect data that we subsequently subjected to inductive content analysis. As a result, we identified 12 major characteristics of citizens’ perspectives, including feedback/inputs, local knowledge, questions, and pessimistic views. We also unveiled distinctive and tacit contributors to their positive responses, such as affirmations and the gaining of new knowledge and perceptions, along with possible confronting factors that might have hindered their responses. The findings suggest that citizens’ perspectives and responses represent locally embedded context-specific values and knowledge, the specification of which can help attract public support for academic research. Hence, identifying and incorporating these variables can help make research on regional decarbonization more context-relevant.