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The evolution of the NSDI concept
It is useful to distinguish two stages in the evolution of the NSDI concept; a first generation consisting of a relatively small number of countries and a much larger second generation. The origins of the first generation go back to the 1980's while the starting point for the second generation is around the year 2000. There are important differences in approach between the two generations and there is also a growing emphasis on implementation in the latter. In addition the second generation has to take account of the role of NSDIs within the local to global hierarchy of spatial data infrastructures.
The findings of the first generation study (Masser 1999) showed that NSDIs came in all shapes and sizes. They included initiatives from Australia, Canada, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, the Netherlands, Portugal, Qatar, the United Kingdom and the United States. They included some recent initiatives that had little to show as yet other than good intentions (in 1996) as well as some more established initiatives that had already achieved a great deal. They mixed together some very small countries with some very large ones, some relatively wealthy countries with relatively poor ones, as well as countries with and without federal systems of government.
The primary objectives of these NSDIs were to promote economic development, to stimulate better government and to foster environmental sustainability. The notion of better government is interpreted in several different ways in them. In some countries it also means better strategic planning and resource development. This is particularly the case in developing countries such as Indonesia and Malaysia. Planning, in the sense of a better state of readiness to deal with emergencies brought about by natural hazards, was also an important driving force in the establishment of the Japanese NSDI while the National Geographic Information System in Portugal was also seen as an instrument for modernising central, regional and local administration.
Participation in the majority of first generation NSDIs was limited to the public sector and most of these involved only central or federal government activities. Although essentially public sector in scope the Australia New Zealand Land Information Council (ANZLIC) was unusual in that it was centrally concerned with the interface between different levels of government. A notable exception to this rule was the Canadian Geospatial Data Infrastructure which brought together representatives from all levels of government together with the private sector and academia.
The development of the Internet and the World Wide Web had a profound impact on the transition from the first to the second generation of NSDIs. This was recognised by the US Mapping Sciences Committee in their report on Distributed Geolibraries (National Research Council 1999). In their view 'the WWW has added a new and radically different dimension to its earlier conception of the NSDI, one that is much more user oriented, much more effective in maximising the added value of the nation's geoinformation assets, and much more cost effective as a data dissemination mechanism.'
Given these and other related developments Rajabifard et al (2003) argue that the development of the second generation of NSDIs began around 2000. The second generation consists of two distinct groups: first generation NSDIs that are evolving from a product to a process model, and a substantial number of new entrants from all parts of the world. These entrants have benefited substantially from the growing body of materials that is available on the WWW and elsewhere on the experiences of the first generation. An important factor in the dissemination process has been the creation of the NSDI Cookbook, which was launched at the GSDI 4 conference at Capetown in 2000 and is regularly updated on the GSDI web site (www.gsdi.org).
Notwithstanding the technological innovations that have taken place during the last decade the distinctive feature of the second generation of NSDIs is the shift that is taking place from the product model that characterised most of the first generation to a process model of an NSDI. With this in mind Rajabifard et al (2003) argue that database creation was to a very large extent the key driver of the first generation and that, as a result, most of these initiatives tended to be data producer, and national mapping agency, led. The shift from the product to the process model is essentially a shift in emphasis from the concerns of data producers to those of data users. The main driving forces behind the data process model are data sharing and reusing data collected by a wide range of agencies for a great diversity of purposes at various times. Also associated with this change in emphasis is a shift from the centralised structures that characterised most of the first generation of NSDIs to the decentralised and distributed networks that are a basic feature of the WWW.
These shifts in emphasis are reflected in the typology developed by the Spatial Applications Division of the Catholic University of Leuven as a result of their study of NSDIs in 29 European and three other countries (SAD 2003). This is based largely on the nature of NSDI coordination in different countries as it is felt that this is a major success factor for each NSDI. A basic distinction is made between countries where a national data producer such as a mapping agency has an implicit mandate to set up an NSDI and countries where NSDI development has been driven by a council of Ministries, a GI association or partnership of data users. The findings of this study suggest that Denmark, Finland and Sweden fall into the former category that is regarded as the most basic model of a NSDI. Britain, France and Germany fall into the latter category whose fundamental characteristic is that the participants are willing to share spatial data with one another.
Some other implications of this change in emphasis can also be seen in a study comparing Australian, Canadian and US experiences with respect to NSDI implementation (Masser, 2003). The findings of this study suggest that leadership involves a great deal more than coordination. Whereas coordination implies to some extent a reactive mode of operation within well established structures leadership implies a more proactive mode in situations where it may be necessary to create new forms of organisation. This is evident in some of the different partnership structures that have emerged in all three countries to facilitate NSDI implementation.
The study also highlights the extent to which effective NSDI implementation involves the active participation of many different agencies at the sub national as well as the national level. In each of the three countries the lead agency in NSDI formulation is the national/federal government However its effective implementation lies to a considerable extent in the hands of the state and local government agencies who act as lead agencies at the sub national level. The findings of the analysis suggest that there is both a top down and a bottom up dimension to the relationships between the different levels involved in the NSDI development process. National SDI strategies drive state wide SDI strategies and state wide SDI strategies drive local level SDI strategies. As most of the detailed database maintenance and updating tasks are carried out at the local level the input of local government also has a considerable influence on the process of SDI implementation at the state and national levels. The outcomes of such processes from the standpoint of the national SDI are likely to be that the detail of SDI implementation will vary considerably from one sub national agency to another. Consequently the NSDI that emerges from this process will be a collage of similar but often quite distinctive components that reflect the commitments and aspirations of the different sub national governmental agencies.
Evaluation
It is clear from this brief over of the SDI phenomenon that the old adage that Rome wasn’t built in a day is equally applicable to NSDIs. The creation of NSDIs is a long term task that may take years or even decades before they are fully operational. This process is likely to be an evolving one that will also reflect the extent to which the organisations that are involved are changing themselves over time. It is also dependent to some extent on the extent to which the main elements of the institutional context that are needed to facilitate NSDI implementation are already in place. Because of the particular institutional context that has emerged in Australia, for example, where key administrative duties for geographic information are lie with the states, the task should be much simpler and take less time than will be the case in the United States. However it should also be borne in mind that the existing institutional context can create barriers to implementation that hinder effective implementation in some countries and that the rate of progress may be faster in some less developed countries where there are fewer obstacles of this kind to be overcome. The rate of progress is also likely to be influenced by the scale of the capacity building efforts that are required to ensure that the maximum use is made of NSDI efforts.
Major changes in the form and content of NSDIs can also be expected over time. A good example of this is the changes that have taken place with respect to Britain's National Geospatial Data Framework that was launched in 1996. Its original web site (www.ngdf.org.uk) is no longer operational and enquirers are informed that all the relevant information has been transferred to the GIgateway web site that is funded by the Government through its National Interest Mapping Services Agreement with Ordnance Survey and administered by the Association for Geographic Information. Alongside these developments, however, is the recent emergence of SDIs for some of the regions within the United Kingdom that has been stimulated by the devolution of some powers to elected regional assemblies in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales.
Capacity building
From the above analysis it can be seen that the implementation of a SDI is also a process of organisational change management. Despite this the need for capacity building initiatives to be developed in parallel to the processes of NSDI implementation is often underestimated (Masser 2001). This is partly due the confusion that exists about the meaning of capacity building itself. With this mind the following section of this paper considers the nature of capacity building from the standpoint of SDI development and then examines some examples of the main types of capacity building that are occurring in two key strategic areas of SDI implementation: coalition formation and institutional development.
What is capacity building?
The results of a Google search on the word 'capacity building' highlight the wide variety of interpretations of the term. These include human resource development, organisational change and societal transformation (see, for example, National Research Council 2002 and Pauknerova et al 2003). Nevertheless to some people it means essentially the training of SDI technicians and managers although this definition is often extended to include the education of politicians and the general public outside the geographic information industry (see, for example, Dale, quoted in Hopkins 2004).
To others, including those involved in SDI development, it is necessary to take a much broader view of capacity building. For example, the Changelinks website maintained by the Department of Natural Resources Management at Massey University defines capacity building for environmental management in the following terms
'The contemporary view of capacity building goes beyond the conventional perception of training. The central concerns of environmental management - to manage change, to resolve conflict, to manage institutional pluralism, to enhance coordination, to foster communication, and to ensure that data and information are shared - require a broad and holistic view of capacity building (http://nrm.massey.ac.nz/changelinks/capacity.html).'
If the term ' environmental management' is replaced by 'SDI development' this can be seen as a useful definition of some of the key strategic capacity building tasks involved in SDI implementation.
It can be argued that such a view is synonymous with organisational learning (Rickett, nd). This standpoint is reflected in the African Capacity Building Foundation's approach which argues that 'capacity building should not only involve the creation of new human and institutional capacity, but also the effective utilisation of existing capacity as well as the retrieval and regeneration of hitherto lost or decaying capacity (www.abfc-pact.org).'
However, it is also important to bear in mind that capacity building activities, particularly at the trans national level, can have a negative as well as a positive impact in less developed countries. Fukuda-Parr et al (2002), for example, have shown how technical cooperation programmes can adversely affect the development of local organisations as a result of two mistaken assumptions:
'The first is that it is possible simply to ignore existing capacities in developing countries and replace them with knowledge and systems elsewhere - a form of development as displacement rather than development as transformation. The second assumption concerns the asymmetric donor recipient relationship - the belief that it is possible ultimately for donors to control the process and yet consider the recipients to be equal partners.'
Coalition formation
The effective implementation of SDIs is very much dependent on the extent to which they reflect the capabilities and the aspirations of all the stakeholders that are involved. This is particularly important in the early stages of SDI development when it is desirable to involve as many of the stakeholders as possible to participate in the process to form coalitions to formulate SDIs.
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