Gamifying Green Governance is a research project hosted at the IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark. It is funded by the Independent Research Fund Denmark, and runs from 2024-2027.
The project explores the introduction of gamification mechanisms into green volunteering in China. Globally, volunteering is a powerful force in the green transition: it enrols people into local networks of engagement, is consistently recommended as an antidote to climate despair, and in China alone, amounts to 1.6 billion hours of service per year (Yuan 2022).
In Gamifiying Green Governance, we explore what happens when green volunteering is gamified, when ‘doing good’ (Hoffman and StJohn 2017) becomes morally ambiguous, interrogating both the freighting of public good with private gain and raising fundamental questions about the politics of gamification for planetary ends. We are interested in everyday volunteering moralities, and – building on a prior project called Moving Data-Moving People – in the relationship between volunteering and credit.
We approach green volunteering ethnographically and are interested in how people describe, collect information about, communicate, register, value, manage, and feel about it.
The project is anchored by three questions
- What are the effects of making green volunteering credit-earning?
- How do gamification mechanisms shape users’ experiences of green volunteering?
- In what ways does gamification change ethical self-formation?