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The purpose of this paper is to draw upon concepts in community‐oriented policing in order to explore the distribution of citizen water‐monitoring organizations and their role in community environmental policing, in order to address the issue of environmental justice. The empirical portion of the analysis examines the distribution of these organizations across states, and the relationship of this distribution to social inequity.

This study design is cross‐sectional in nature and examines the distribution and density of 1,308 citizen water‐monitoring organizations across states. Ordinary least squares regression is used to examine the relationship between the density and social disadvantage while controlling for environmental enforcement patterns, rates of non‐compliance, water quality, region of the country, water area, and coastal states.

Race and ethnicity are negatively correlated with the density of water‐monitoring organizations across states. Median household income is positively correlated with water‐monitoring organizations across states.

This paper suggests that community environmental policing is a response to ecological disorganization. More specifically, in the case of citizen‐led water‐monitoring organizations it is critical that states with relatively large proportions of low income, black and Hispanic residents help provide resources to encourage the development of these community groups.

This paper is the first to draw upon the ideas found in the community‐oriented policing literature to examine water‐monitoring organizations. While the literature suggests that collaborative efforts between state law enforcement agencies and water‐monitoring organizations may help combat ecological disorganization, it is also the first study to suggest that environmental injustice could be an unintended drawback of community environmental policing.

This paper responds to recent calls for deeper scrutiny of the institutional contexts of citizen science. In the last few years, at least two dozen civil society organizations in New York and Pennsylvania have begun monitoring the watershed impacts of unconventional natural gas drilling, also known as “fracking.” This study examines the institutional logics that inform these citizen monitoring efforts and probes how relationships with academic science and the regulatory state affect the practices of citizen scientists. We find that the diverse practices of the organizations in the participatory water monitoring field are guided by logics of consciousness-raising, environmental policing, and science. Organizations that initiate monitoring projects typically attempt to combine two or more of these logics as they develop new practices in response to macro-level social and environmental changes. The dominant logic of the field remains unsettled, and many groups appear uncertain about whether and how their practices might have an influence. We conclude that the impacts of macro-level changes, such as the scientization of politics, the rise of neoliberal policy ideas, or even large-scale industrial transformations, are likely to be experienced in field-specific ways.

This Introduction gives a historical and theoretical overview of this volume on Fields of Knowledge: Science, Politics and Publics in the Neoliberal Age, which showcases original research in political sociology of science targeting the changes in scientific and technological policy and practice associated with the rise of neoliberal thought and policies since the 1970s. We argue that an existing family of field theoretic frameworks and empirical field analyses provides a particularly useful set of ideas and approaches for the meso-level understanding of these historical changes in ways that complement as well as challenge other theory traditions in sociology of science, broadly defined. The collected papers exhibit a dual focus on sciences’ interfield relations, connecting science and science policy to political, economic, educational, and other fields and on the institutional logics of scientific fields that pattern expert discourses, practices, and knowledge and shape relations of the scientific field to the rest of the world. By reconceptualizing the central problem for political sociology of science as a problem of field- and inter-field dynamics, and by critically engaging other theory traditions whose assumptions are in some ways undermined by the contemporary history of neoliberalism, we believe these papers collectively chart an important theoretical agenda for future research in the sociology of science.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a robotic system to feed aquatic organisms and measure water physicochemical parameters in experimental aquaculture ponds.

A dispatcher unit dispenses a precise amount of food and control panel software schedules the tasks and operates the robot. In the control panel, the feeding and measuring schedule is defined and sent to the mobile robot and the amount of food is requested by the robot to the dispatcher for each pond. The robot travels automatically on a monorail to dispense the food and measure the water parameters. The data are transmitted to the control panel. The system can be remotely operated over the internet through a client‐server software framework.

The robotic system is a tool for delegating feeding and measuring tasks. This allows researchers and technicians time to focus on more substantive aquacultural research tasks.

Future improvement will include an automatic unit for cleaning sensors between ponds to minimize the risk of cross‐contamination.

The system systematized feeding and measuring tasks, minimized human error, and optimized the use of resources for aquacultural experimentation. The robotic system can be programmed for a variety of experimental conditions, such as the delivery of different diets at diverse schedules.

The proposed robot was tested for feeding freshwater redclaw crayfish (Cherax quadricarinatus) and monitored the water parameters in real time. Based on the field results, the robotic system provided a reliable and robust device for aquacultural research applications.

Ongoing environmental threats have intensified the need for firms to take big leaps forward to operate in a manner that is both ecologically sustainable and socially responsible. This paper aims to assess the degree to which firms are adopting citizen science as a tool to achieve sustainability and social responsibility targets.

This study applies a qualitative content analysis approach to assess the current presence of citizen science in sustainability and social responsibility reports issued by Globescan sustainability leaders and by firms ranked by the Fortune 500 and Fortune Global 500.

While the term itself is mostly absent from reports, firms are reporting on a range of activities that could be classified as a form of “citizen science.”

Citizen science can help firms achieve their corporate sustainability and corporate social responsibility goals and targets. Linking sustainability and social responsibility efforts to this existing framework can help triangulate corporate efforts to engage with stakeholders, collect data about the state of the environment and promote better stewardship of natural resources.

Supporting citizen science can help firms work toward meeting UN Sustainable Development Goals, which have highlighted the importance of collaborative efforts that can engage a broad range of stakeholders in the transition to more sustainable business models.

This paper is the first to examine citizen science in a corporate sustainability and social responsibility context. The findings present information to support improvements to the development of locally relevant science-based indicators; real-time monitoring of natural resources and supply chain sustainability; and participatory forums for stakeholders including suppliers, end users and the broader community.

Reducing Level of Alcohol in Inks ‐ A medium‐sized US ink manufacturer recently needed to reduce the level of alcohol in its bases for water‐based inks. Ciba Geigy Pigments Division's Inks Technical Centre developed an improved formulation, containing half the alcohol of the previous one and 40 per cent more pigment to allow the ink producer to meet VOC limits and increase production efficiency, at no additional cost.

Through research and first‐hand experience with more than one hundred nonprofit mergers in the past decade, the firm has developed a variety of tools to help nonprofit organizations determine whether to undertake merger negotiations, how to facilitate these negotiations, and how to integrate organizations post‐merger.

The authors have conducted more than 100 nonprofit mergers. They also interviewed board members and CEOs of nonprofits that have merged.

The critical differences between mergers in for‐profit and nonprofit sectors occur in the negotiations phase, which is where board members often play a key role.

This article addresses the merger process, not the business case. More research is needed on the economic benefits of nonprofit mergers.

The article identifies best practices for nonprofit mergers.

This article alerts volunteer board members from the for‐profit sector to the essential differences they face facilitating mergers in the nonprofit sector and provides them with a step‐by‐step guide to success.

Democracy is a process that depends on a vibrant civil society. Civil society is produced by individuals and groups making choices, innovating, and taking risks to act on public issues that they care deeply about. One of those public issues is water quality. Water quality affects the health and well-being of every person and business in every community. One-third of the world’s population live in areas with moderate to high levels of water contamination (United Nations, 2000). This is a problem that won’t go away; as economic development expands and world population increases, so will the need for clean water. “Global freshwater consumption rose sixfold between 1900 and 1995 – more than twice the rate of population growth” (United Nations, 2000). Government regulations and programs to decrease degraded waters have focused on point source pollution – the reduction of readily identifiable pollution sources such as effluents from municipal wastewater treatment plants or industrial factory discharges into streams and rivers. However, it has become increasingly clear that a large portion of the contamination of waters originates from land use around these waters (such as farm fields, streets, housing construction, and homeowner practices) rather than specific point sources (Novotny & Chesters, 1981; Thornton et al., 1999). In the U.S., non-point sources deliver four billion tons of sediment yearly to streams and rivers, contribute to approximately 80% of total nitrogen load and 50% of phosphorous load into receiving waters, and account for over 98% of fecal and total coliform counts (Novotny & Chesters, 1981).

This paper aims to provide a review of the role of robots for monitoring the environment.

Following a short introduction, this paper discusses developments in aquatic, terrestrial and airborne robots for monitoring the environment. Brief conclusions are drawn.

This shows that robots are being developed for all manner of environmental monitoring applications. Aquatic devices are attracting the greatest attention but both terrestrial and airborne robots have the potential to play an important, future role. In many instances, their deployment reflects the difficulties in or impossibility of using manual monitoring methods. A longer‐term vision of large numbers of robots conducting environmental monitoring on a routine basis is unlikely to be realised unless lower cost solutions can be developed.

Environmental monitoring robots have been under development since the 1990s and this paper provides a review of recent activities.

This paper examines the emergence of collaborative watershed management in Lake Tahoe by focusing on how institutions managing coordination and conflict have changed over time. It begins by describing the evolution of watershed governance and examines the extent to which the institutional arrangement demonstrates the eight design principles proposed by Elinor Ostrom for successful common pool resource (CPR) management. The paper then develops the concept of a complex environmental commons (CEC) to differentiate the situation of Lake Tahoe from the simpler CPR dilemmas frequently discussed in the CPR literature. We then propose five additional principles that contribute to collaborative management of a CEC.