November 2024 – As security technologies become ever more present in our public and private spaces, we citizens feel increasingly powerless because we do not understand them, and suspicious of being under constant surveillance.
How to make such technologies more citizen-friendly? The EU-funded TRANSCEND project, coordinated by Trilateral Research Ireland and in which Efus is a partner, has been working on this question for the past two years, with one more year to go.
We met with Leanne Cochrane, the project’s scientific coordinator and head of the Crisis and Security cluster at Trilateral Research.
What is the TRANSCEND project about, in a few words?
Leanne Cochrane: The project is about improving civil society engagement and assessment of civil society’s needs concerning security technologies. We do this by trialling different methods in ‘live’ security research contexts. Security technologies are increasingly present in our lives and citizens are aware of this, but in practice, they are engaged in only a limited way. This gap between development and civil society can generate mistrust among the public and also hamper the development of technologies that really respond to citizens’ needs and take into account their diverse experiences.
How do we know that civil society is generally not involved in the research and development of security technologies? Are there surveys on this?
Indeed, we did some research on the involvement of civil society organisations (CSOs), but I would point out the CSOs are only one (important) aspect of civil society. We mapped involvement of CSOs in European research projects and produced a report that is available on the project’s website.
It shows that as the EU’s Security Research Programme unfolded throughout the years, citizen participation in security research was very scarce, despite citizens being often at the receiving end of the application of the technologies, procedures, and methodologies developed in the projects. However, in recent years, a number of measures have been adopted to address some of these issues. This includes the systematisation of the principles of Responsible Research and Innovation and the opening of research calls for proposals dealing with societal concerns, requiring civil society participation, primarily achieved through CSO involvement. As such, as per the figures mentioned in our report, for the European Union’s 438 Horizon 2020 projects, there were 318 actors listed either as coordinator, participant, or partner to a project that fall within our CSO mapping. The number for Horizon Europe’s 107 projects was 252. It’s important to note that each project involves several actors. On the other issue, we have some materials forthcoming on the complex landscape of civil society and the role of CSOs therein. Keep checking the website.
Why is this lack of involvement a problem?
Because it affects the democratic value of the R&D environment in Europe. This is particularly problematic in the field of security, where so many of the countermeasures to security issues are marked by a difficult balance between different societal values. Moreover, and from a more practical perspective, it also impacts on the societal acceptance of the security project outcomes, meaning that end-users – the citizens – are less likely to embrace or apply the security technologies because their concerns are not taken into account in the design of such technologies.
“The majority of citizens don’t know how to get involved in security technology development, while researchers are not always aware of the range of citizens’ concerns.”
What are the main barriers that still hamper such involvement?
The picture is quite complex, but mainly the lack of awareness and resources – financial and staff skills. Most civil society organisations are small; they generally are under-funded and lack the training and skills needed to engage in security research. Sometimes, they don’t want to be involved. Then if you look more broadly at civil society, the majority of citizens don’t know how to get involved nor is an opportunity for involvement offered to them, even though they are often directly affected by security technologies. On the other hand, researchers generally struggle to explain the technologies they are developing and are not always aware of the range of citizens’ concerns or how to involve them. There’s not enough outreach and still too many siloes. Separately, as alluded to in my previous response, there is a tendency to conflate civil society with civil society organisations (CSOs). While CSOs represent an important section of civil society, often advocating for specific interests of citizens, there will remain a large portion of the EU population whose needs are unlikely to be accounted for with this (CSO exclusive) approach. Depending on the research, this might require an effort to meet citizens more broadly at their established meeting points, for example schools, community centres, sports facilities, places of worship, etc.
What would be the benefits of a closer dialogue between researchers and citizens on security technologies?
If we manage to narrow or bridge that gap, technology development will be more sustainable and transparent and importantly garner more public trust. Technology should reflect the breadth of society’s concerns regarding security and avoid embedding discriminatory aspects. This is even more important now with the advent of Artificial Intelligence, which is based on algorithms and is data-sourced, thus at risk of repeating and amplifying discriminatory factors embedded in the existing data.
How will the TRANSCEND project contribute to fostering such dialogue?
One of our goals is to produce a toolbox that can be used by municipalities, civil society organisations, security practitioners, public institutions, governments, but also developers. It is deliberately aimed at a broad audience. Another ‘product’ of the project will be four policy briefs aimed at policymakers both from national and local levels of governance. A third aspect is a training module for civil society organisations and security practitioners. Lastly, we will organise a TRANSCEND summit in the autumn of 2025, when the project concludes, in Brussels. We will invite this broad range of relevant stakeholders to our showcase event. Potential attendees can already express their interest by signing up via the TRANSCEND website.
Beyond the duration of the project, all our outputs will remain publicly accessible via our Zenodo community and on the European Commission’s source of results from the projects funded by the EU’s framework programmes for research and innovation.
What would be your message to local and regional authorities represented in the European Forum for Urban Security?
That engaging citizens brings many advantages and is perfectly do-able even though challenging. The benefit to them will be much greater than the cost. We hope that the tools we are developing through the TRANSCEND project will help local authorities with this effort to involve citizens more closely and engage with them so that security technologies better match their concerns and represent the full diversity of civil society. They can follow the project posts through our LinkedIn Network to keep updated.
> The main results from the TRANSCEND project so far are available here
> More information on Efus’ website and on the project’s website
