There is a pressing need for volunteer amateur naturalists to participate in data collection for biodiversity monitoring programmes in Europe. It is being addressed in some countries, but less so in others. This paper discusses the results from qualitative research using semi-structured interviews, focus groups and participant observation within nine Participatory Monitoring Network (PMN) organisations in six European countries. The paper examines the features that facilitate recruitment, retention and motivations of volunteers to participate in biodiversity monitoring, including the social and cultural milieus in which they operate. The paper concludes that volunteers place a high degree of significance on their social experience within PMNs. Successful creation and management of PMNs thus requires that similar levels of attention be paid to social aspects of the organisation as are paid to the generation and management of data.

Introduction Citizenship is a complex term with multiple genealogies, strongly rooted in a history of European political thought and practice that traces itself back to the Greeks, and the Aristotelian distinction between public and private. Taken in its broadest sense, the term denotes an open-ended assemblage of beliefs, values, practices, rights, entitlements, obligations, procedures, institutions, laws, social structures, and forms of belonging that together constitute individuals as participants in the public life of a collective. Generally, following the republican and liberal traditions of citizenship, this collective is the stateöbut in alternative readings the term is also increasingly coming into use for other collectives such as cities, places, political organisations, and even the planet (eg van Steenbergen, 1994). Kymlicka and Norman (1994) note that citizenship possesses at least two distinct aspects: understood as a`legal status', the term refers to a technical, legally defined position within the framework of a particular social and political entity such as a state. As a`desirable activity', on the other hand, it points to a loosely defined bundle of individual practices and activities to be fostered, desirable insofar as they are oriented towards furthering the good of a particular community (page 353). Here,`citizenship' operates to: identify desirable values, behaviours, attitudes, associations, and practices; specify the terms and conditions of appropriate participation

Public participation is a key element in nature conservation in Europe and a necessity for collecting broad scale data on biodiversity and its dynamics. However, vast societal differences exist between eastern and western European countries, resulting in problems for public participation in post-communist states as compared to western countries. Here, we compare diversity in monitoring practices and public participation in countries with different political histories. Drawing on in-depth ethnographic studies conducted in Lithuania and Poland, as well as a rapid assessment in Denmark, we have focused on the historical, cultural and social determinants of the volunteers' participation in biodiversity monitoring. Our results indicate the reasons why volunteer involvement-as an expression of a participatory approach-has a lower incidence in the post-communist countries, compared to voluntarism common in occidental democracies. We discuss our results in the context of the main social factors considered to be a legacy of the Soviet regime.