Overview:

Contexts provide a mechanism for securing and sharing environment variables across projects. The environment variables are defined as name/value pairs and are injected at runtime. 

CircleCI inherits permissions from GitHub when using the GitHub OAuth integration. This means the user must have the correct permissions in GitHub in order to be able to create, add and edit environment variables within a context. 

Permissions needed to create a context, add and edit environment variables within a context:

Any organization member that has write permissions to at least project within the organization. 

Permissions needed view and use a context: 

All members of an organization can use a non-restricted context. 

Additional Resources:

• CircleCI Context 
• CircleCI GitHub OAuth integration