Theory & Practice

Conceptual issues and Debates in PGIS

PGIS practice has evolved along different paths in the South and in the North. The former has emerged as an intersection of participatory development and GIT&S through the integration of low and high tech spatial information management applications, while in the North, PGIS practice has evolved as an intersection of participatory planning and GIT&S making use of increasingly sophisticated internet-based approaches.

The proposed conference – the first of its kind – will focus on community mapping and PGIS applications in developing countries and First Nations / First Peoples (referring to indigenous people’s governments and political units) across the themes of natural resource management, resource access, control and tenure. Of particular importance are the contexts of participatory spatial planning, natural resource management, conflict resolution and communication.

The conference draws on four events that took place in 2004 namely: (i) The International Forum on Indigenous Mapping for Indigenous Advocacy and Empowerment, March 11-14, 2004 Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada; (ii) a pre-conference PGIS workshop held in the context of GISDECO 2004 , May 10-12, 2004, Johor Malaysia; (ii) the international track of the 3rd Public Participation GIS Conference held on  July 18-20, 2004 in Madison, Wisconsin, USA; and (iii) the Regional Community Mapping Network Workshop; held on  November 8-10, 2004 in Quezon City, Philippines.

Among practitioners, researchers and activists, there was a general consensus that PGIS practice is more advanced than the theory behind the applications and that there is a need to evaluate the experiences (failures and successes), and develop guidelines and strategies for good practice and for the sound adoption of PGIS to meet the needs of different groups within the developing world. 

GIS applications in developing countries are often externally driven and geared towards data management instead of community empowerment and many advocate for more robust GIS technology transfer to ensure sustainability. Important questions of ownership need to be addressed at the beginning, when decisions are taken to set up GIS facilities (Whose GIS? Whose spatial questions? What will happen when experts leave or when donor funding dries up? What is left with those who generated the data?).

The conference seeks to address these and other methodological and implementation PGIS issues, including the relationships existing between local civil society and socially differentiated communities, by questioning which, and how, individuals and/or groups could be empowered by having access to GIT&S data and facilities and how the same processes could marginalize and disenfranchise others.

Also of interest is the issue of “scale” as different community issues and questions require a particular scale of analysis.  Also important is the degree of spatial / locational “precision” (or accuracy) which is required or appropriate in participatory (local-level) spatial planning. PGIS often involves integrating local / indigenous knowledge and modern scientific knowledge for applications that can potentially empower local communities. This involves combining low and high technology, and thus the resultant questions of accuracy tradeoffs, reliability and acceptability.

There are real issues around the concept of local knowledge, specifically, ISK.   Much ISK may complement ‘scientific knowledge’, as found e.g. in resource location, water conservation, or livestock management. In some cases ISK might be considered more relevant (to the users) because it embodies generations of practical knowledge and frames interactive and holistic systems.  Beyond this, there is ISK cognitively different from scientific knowledge, related to ‘mental maps’.  It is symbolic and visionary, (mystical in ‘scientific’ terms), and especially related to land and its resources.  People’s mental maps handle this ‘naive space’ by incorporating overlapping or layered zones, blurred or multiple boundaries, and uncertain or restricted spatial point locations.

Additional topics which will be discussed at the conference are the identification of avenues for institutionalising PGIS practice within local planning and development agencies (if appropriate), mechanisms for ensuring protection of privacy and intellectual ownership of local knowledge and for promoting control and access to data and information to those who generated such data.

Participation is seen as the key to good PGIS practice, thus implying that participation in the process is more important than technologies and systems.  Some critics of PGIS practice argue that the process can obfuscate systematic inequalities through unequal and superficial participation.  For example, “participatory” planning and PGIS may be used to legitimise decisions which in fact were decided by others.

PGIS practice has to be embedded into a well thought out process, including understanding peoples’ questions, assessing the existing legal and regulatory frameworks, jointly setting project objectives, defining strategies and choosing appropriate spatial information management tools. Such choices involve a broad range of tools and methods ranging from low-tech sketch mapping to integrating hi-tech GIT&S, and always foregrounding the issues of connectivity and the skills and capacities of actors concerned with the systems being developed, with or without external support and funding.  

In addition, it is crucial to have in place the responsive legal and regulatory frameworks in which the PGIS processes can unfold.  In situations where there is a policy vacuum or actual legislative opposition to the legitimisation of participatory mapping, the appropriate advocacy and supportive actions need to be initiated.