Citizen Observations as Legal Obligations: (Dis)Associations and Representation at the Swedish Land and Environment Court of Appeal

There is an increasing international trend in environmental activism to use legal institutions and infrastructures for citizen science (CS) to affect policy and regulation. However, knowledge about observations produced in activist CS and their functions at courts is scarce. To address this, we analyze how citizen observations (COs) reported to an established infrastructure for CS assist in producing legal obligations. Sweden provides an exemplary case due to the integration between CS biodiversity infrastructures, environmental regulation, and the increasing number of legal environmental conflicts. Data was gathered from documentation of legal cases argued in front of the Land and Environment Court of Appeal (LECA) from 2012 to 2020, and interviews with civil servants at Swedish environmental public authorities. Through a qualitative analysis, we find several ways that COs get associated to legal obligations, including through civil servants’ decisions, species spatial-temporality, comparisons between different CS reporting systems, the negotiation of species status on red lists, and interpretations of species behavior. We relate our findings to a broader discussion on what forms of representation matter in environmental regulation and who and what can speak for species and entities making up the world.