Citizen science, and public engagement with science, has become prominent in science policy programmes. Given the expectations attached to citizen science in academic and science policy discourses, it is worthwhile to look at where the actual work is done. The case of South Africa, the study focus, is interesting because the country follows similar programmes as many developed countries, but has a socioeconomically and educationally more unequal society. Thus, South Africa presented a test example of whether the institutional similarities of science or socioeconomic and educational differences prevail in shaping the reality of citizen science. Results from 56 projects showed that nearly all of them were limited to data collection in life science fields and were managed largely by one university and mainly communicated within the respective science communities. This led us to conclude that the ambitious rhetoric accompanying citizen science in science policy programmes is not matched by reality.

公民科学和公众参与科学，在科学政策计划中变得突出。鉴于在学术和科学政策话语中对公民科学的期望，有必要看看实际工作在哪里完成。研究重点南非的案例很有趣，因为该国遵循与许多发达国家类似的计划，但社会经济和教育上的社会更加不平等。因此，南非提供了一个测试例子，说明科学的制度相似性或社会经济和教育差异是否在塑造公民科学的现实中占主导地位。来自 56 个项目的结果表明，几乎所有项目都仅限于生命科学领域的数据收集，主要由一所大学管理，主要在各自的科学界进行交流。