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Next East West Center, Honolulu, USA Krisnawati Suryanata, Albertus Hadi Pramono Deparmtnet of Geography, University of Hawaii at Manoa, USA The growth in geospatial technologies has enabled communities to make maps of their lands and resource uses, and to bolster the legitimacy of their customary claims to resources. Yet, the impacts of widespread adoption of SIT at the local level are not limited to intended objectives. Some scholars argue that mapping technologies simultaneously empower and disadvantage indigenous communities; others suggest that GIS technology privileges 'particular conceptions and forms of knowledge, knowing, and language' and engenders unequal access to information; still others view GIS as incompatible with indigenous knowledge systems and as separating the community that has knowledge from information. Tensions thus exist between new patterns of empowerment yielded through SIT and broader social, political, economic, and ethical ramifications of the technology. This article and the research project on which it is based emerged out of common and yet distinct concerns among the authors that spatial information technologies-at least in certain contexts and at certain scales-alter the complexion and distribution of power with respect to land and resources, as well as the ways in which small-scale communities think about power and its relationship to natural systems and human interests. In order to test and refine our ideas about the socio-ethical implications of SIT and the possibility of its ironic effects, we conducted a year-long project involving representatives of non-governmental organizations (NGOs), project staff members, and university researchers from Cambodia, China, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, and the United States. This article summarizes the project's outcomes.  TOOLS, TECHNOLOGIES AND IRONIC EFFECTS Critically assessing the impacts of SIT requires us to clarify the relationship between tools and technologies. Tools are products of technological processes, used by individuals, which are evaluated on their task-specific utility. In contrast, technologies consist of widespread patterns of material and conceptual practices that embody and deploy particular strategic values and meanings. The system of SIT include: collection of base data using GPS units; their storage in databases; the advertising and marketing of these tools; and a reframing of the politics of development. As a technology, SIT transforms discourses about land and resources, the meaning of geographic knowledge, the work practices of mapping and legal professionals, and, ultimately, the very meaning of space itself. There are two major implications of the tool/technology distinction. First, while we can refuse to use a tool, there are no clear "exit rights" from the effects of heavily deployed technologies, even for individuals electing not to use the tools produced by those technologies. Indeed, critical histories of technology suggest that beyond certain levels of intensity and scales of deployment, technologies begin generating problems of the type that they are suited to solving, producing distinctive patterns of ironic effects that ramify well outside the technology sector. Second, critical evaluation of a technology must go beyond assessing how well relevant tools perform, to examining the changes that a technology brings about within and among societal systems, and how they affect the values structuring the dynamics of such systems. Page 1 of 2
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