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October 2003 |
Do participatory methods meet their claim?
The GI technology should give voice to local people by putting them and their local (spatial) knowledge on an equal footing with external experts and decision-makers. An 'empowerment functionality' in P-GIS would include the ability of the GI tools to convince external decision-makers, which strengthens the validity of the P-GIS application and its specific outputs, across both the governing and the governed. Local society could apply the output to scenario-building and visualising alternative futures.
There are many examples of this in P-GIS used to 'claim our land', i.e. legal recognition of customary land and resource rights. (e.g. Fox 1994; Sirait et al. 1994; Rambaldi 2002)
Legitimacy of Ownership of Spatial Knowledge
Symbolic, as well as practical, 'ownership' of key geo/spatial information is illustrated by the simple question - 'Who chooses the items depicted on the map, and defined and decoded in the map legend?' (Rambaldi, 2002, p.c.)
Not just the legend, but the whole 'map', needs to be liberated into the control of those who are affected by it. Empowerment can be promoted by transferring ownership from the conventionally powerful (typically, first clients for improved spatial information such as tax collectors and security forces) to the disadvantaged by the use of counter maps that challenge the (spatial) views of the powerful. Counter maps were initiated by Peluso (1995), to apply to gendered construction of space.
Ownership is related to the ethics of ITK (indigenous technical knowledge) elicitation, which has been usually treated as a 'free for all'. A strong position on ownership, and therefore on limiting access, of 'secret', sacred, spatial knowledge is taken by Harmsworth (1997) with regard to Maori peoples. Similar acceptance that locations, uses, even stories, about sacred sites are secret is found in Australia and North America.
A related question is whether ownership of knowledge includes the right to prevent others from using it. Maoris in Aotearoa, and First Nations in N. America make legal-political moves towards a 'communal right of privacy'. This means customary leaders' responsibility for data protection, and thus control over GIS data layers such as sacred sites. However, these protectionist views could be interpreted also as maintaining the privileged position of an elite class of male elders who thrive from restricted knowledge of resource locations and potentials, and consequently disenfranchise women.
ISK (indigenous spatial knowledge) data layers to be protected, with increasing intensity, in USA, Canada and NZ:
- Traditional gathering, hunting, trapping, fishing, grazing, fuel collection, tool sources, lands, desert waterholes.
- Outer boundaries of culture areas, clans, tribes, indigenous place names
- Customary property delineations/demarcations within the cultural boundary, e.g. by clan, lineage, bands, household, intra-household, male and female areas.
- Historic places, battlegrounds, old villages.
- Sacred sites, burial grounds, ceremonial areas, shrines, buried art (dangers of vandalism), creation myths.
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