Magdalena Roszczynska-Kurasinska

In recent years, diets that minimize or exclude meat and animal-derived products have garnered considerable attention and popularity in the Western world. This study seeks to analyze Reddit discussion data to investigate the motivations, opportunities, and capabilities involved in adopting plant-based, vegetarian, or reduced meat consumption diets in three European countries: Poland, Portugal, and the United Kingdom. Considering all 1,151 comments from the three Reddit threads, motivations were the most frequently discussed COM-B component, with 291 comments (25%), followed by opportunities with 195 comments (17%). Capabilities were the least mentioned component, appearing in 90 comments (8%). The study highlights and contextualizes the similarities and differences in barriers and enabler across the countries, considering their unique cultural, economic, and social environment.

The Theory and Methods in Digital Government Minitrack invites contributions that integrate approaches from diverse disciplinary domains-such as public administration, information systems, information science, and political science-to advance the theoretical understanding of e-government impacts and transformations. These multi-, cross-, and interdisciplinary perspectives are vital for producing robust studies that underpin sustainable and democratic applications of digital government in policies and practices. Theories and methods are fundamental to ensuring the validity and reliability of research, offering tools to navigate the complex dynamics of digital transformation in the public sector. This Minitrack emphasizes the importance of testing and refining existing theories and methodologies to better capture the rapidly evolving reality of digital government. Fresh theoretical and methodological perspectives are essential for comprehending and critically analyzing the shifting practices associated with the integration of ICT in the public sector. The Minitrack features one session comprising three papers, each of which provides insights into relevant theories and methods that deepen our understanding of the diverse impacts of e-government. The presented papers demonstrate how theoretical frameworks and methodological approaches can illuminate pressing issues in digital governance. The Minitrack includes one session with three papers. The three papers illustrate and discuss relevant theories and methods to help better understanding the diverse impacts of e-government. The first title "Conceptualizing the Roles of Information and Digital Technologies in Digital Global Climate Governance" is authored by Tove Engvall. This paper offers a nuanced theoretical examination of the roles information and digital technologies play in global climate governance. Drawing on structuration theory, it conceptualizes how digital and informational

This chapter illustrates the results of pilot implementation of the grassroot social sustainability framework (GSS) to study specific cases of adaptive reuse projects. The framework is based on the ideas described in detail in another chapter of this book (Żbikowska et al. 2024, Chap. 10, this volume). Here, we present the results of three pilot studies to demonstrate how concepts of social sustainability and intrinsic value can be linked to create a practical methodological framework. Its primary purpose is to enable the analysis of the social surroundings of cultural heritage sites as well as the qualities of the sites themselve, to identify opportunities and threats for achieving long-term grassroots sustainability.

This chapter argues that successfully applying circularity frameworks in cultural heritage projects, especially those tied to local identity, shared history, and a sense of place, often requires ongoing monitoring of the socio-cultural environment, with particular attention to social sustainability. This is crucial for two main reasons: first, the socio-cultural context plays a significant role in shaping how adaptive reuse efforts are perceived and embraced, influencing changes both in the physical environment and within the local community’s mindset. Second, adaptive reuse projects themselves impact the socio-cultural landscape by introducing new ideas and solutions. This dynamic creates a feedback loop, which can either reinforce community cohesion and make the reuse project a success, or, conversely, result in minimal changes or even unintended negative consequences for the neighborhood.

This paper explores the challenges related to implementation of wearable sensors in the context of smart cities, particularly in the domains of health and wellbeing. Such sensors are increasingly used in clinical and public-health interventions, for early symptom identification, performance alerts, and realtime monitoring. While opportunities and benefits presented by wearable technologies are relatively wellknown, this paper's goal is to highlight risks and challenges related to their implementation. Based on the existing literature and lessons learned from EU-funded projects in which smartbands are used to collect healthrelated data, we share insights from integrating wearable sensors into the smart city fabric.

Information and Communication Technology based tools for e-participation, which significantly lowered the entrance cost for citizens, augured widespread presence of citizens in the policy formulation process. However, even after years of practice, citizen engagement in e-participation remains low, especially in relatively new democracies, contributing to imbalance and misrepresentation of citizens' opinions. We present insights from the area of innovation adoption and propose an analytical framework for assessing e-participation initiatives' potential for eliciting wide citizen participation. In our study we examined participatory budgeting in 18 major Polish cities and established that local authorities often fail to make participatory budgeting a successful innovation in terms of inclusion and diversity by overfocusing on needs and expectations of those who participated in the process (10% of population). Officials assessing the success of participatory budgeting only through the lens of its early adopters risk not addressing the needs of the remaining 90% of the population.

Until Recently, The citizen science approach to knowledge production had been confined to scientific research, applied to a limited range of questions on which scientists and citizens could collaborate and trust each other. More recently, this approach has gained increasing attention from various quarters outside the traditional remit of professionalized science, which include local governments, civil society organizations (CSOs), professional networks, and cooperatives. These entities recognize citizen science as a practical method that harnesses the collective resources of a community to address pressing local concerns and promote a robust participatory democracy. Emerging initiatives include citizen observatories, data cooperatives, and collaboration platforms. Despite the growing popularity, managing citizen science initiatives (involving numerous participants over an extended period of time) poses considerable challenges. Leaders of citizen science initiatives grapple with difficulties that appear formidable to overcome. At present, the democratic potential of citizen science necessitates further development and scrutiny from social and political actors. Critics frequently underscore a disparity between the democratic ideals associated with citizen science and its current practical implementation. This article outlines the primary benefits and challenges associated with the democratization of citizen science. It builds from the empirical research of the ISEED project 1 as well as the theoretical contribution of the Right to the Smart City project 2 and formulates 10 key recommendations to citizen science project leaders.

Citizen science is a social innovation that has recently been recognized by social initiatives as a possible tool to increase participation, build knowledge, and raise civic awareness. In order to work efficiently, citizen science requires the adoption of proper technological solutions by a critical mass of people. According to the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology, people are more likely to adopt a technology that is compatible with their norms, values, and beliefs. In our research, we studied technological solutions that Polish environmental civic initiatives are using in order to diagnose their potential to implement citizen science projects and increase citizen participation. We interviewed 28 board representatives, managers, and initiators of social movements and conducted desk research of 65 social movements in Poland. Every technological solution was recorded and later categorized. The diagnostic analysis of the technological advancement of grassroots movements in Poland reveals that the full potential for launching citizen science projects has not yet been reached. First of all, the recognition of the citizen science approach is still low. Secondly, grassroots movements operate using standard and easily accessible technological solutions, rarely developing tailored and more advanced technologies that would enable people to be involved in citizen science projects.