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And if Geospatial Data Infrastructures were fragmented and Splintering?
W.H. Erik de Man
International Institute for Geoinformation Science and Earth Observation (ITC)
The Netherlands
Abstract
Notwithstanding conceptual and theoretical developments regarding GDIs their practical and operational implementation appears problematic. The paper addresses the question whether the promise of GDIs also holds for developing countries and explores some conditions and factors in this respect. To this end, the paper offers a framework for observing and analysing GDIs as facilitator of communication, as infrastructure, as socio-technical system, as common-pool resource, and as community of practice. The paper suggests that institutionalisation of GDIs will be a fruitful concept in that it brings together salient conditions and factors for their sustained performance.
Introduction
Geospatial Data Infrastructures (GDIs) seem to be another ‘promise’ within the continuous development of geographic information technologies. GDIs aim at the sharing, accessibility, and use of geospatial data and encompass institutional, organizational, technical, human and economic resources . As such, the very notion of GDIs reflects the understanding that geographic information technologies – like any technology for that matter – go beyond technicalities alone and have to include ‘the social’ as well. Notwithstanding proliferation of conceptual and theoretical developments regarding GDIs their practical and operational implementation appears unruly and problematic. Hence, the question whether the promise of GDIs also holds for developing countries needs to be dealt with. What are the potentially enabling conditions and what are possible bottlenecks? Developing countries are poor for reasons other than lack of money only. Their poverty extends to information, trained manpower, and public institutions. In addition, developing countries lack functional redundancy as reserve, and security – but above all as facilitator of change (Caiden and Wildavsky, 1974). It would then follow that GDIs should see how existing potentials and institutions could be preserved – if not strengthened – rather than just being innovative and modern . The paper aims at exploring some of the salient conditions and factors in this respect and offers a framework for observing and analysing GDIs rather than another theoretical concept for GDIs per se. To this end, the paper borrows from a series of scientific traditions that – I assume – surround the concept of GDI.
First, GDIs are supposed to facilitate communication. Recent developments in (political) sociology of language may help in identifying some conditions for communication and exchange within GDIs, and barriers for this potential. For example, powerful actors may prevent others from having full and direct access to GDIs. Second, GDIs can obviously be viewed as particular instances of ‘infrastructure networks’ in general. As network GDIs have external effects (‘network externalities’): the more human and organisational actors participate in a GDI the more each of them will benefit. But GDIs would likewise also have potentially fragmenting, discriminating, and excluding effects. Third, because GDIs encompass both technical and social elements they may therefore be regarded as socio-technical systems. In particular the so-called Actor Network Theory helps in understanding how GDIs emerge out of continuous processes of mutual negotiations between human, technical, and other kind of ‘actors’ as proponents, (potential) allies and opponents. Fourth, performance of GDIs can also be perceived in terms of common resources. Problems of abuse and misuse of common (-pool) resources and possible solutions to these problems are dealt with by tradition of ‘coping with tragedies of the commons’. This intellectual tradition provides a repertoire of concepts and approaches that may help in identifying critical factors for success and failure of GDIs. For example, the notion of ‘co-production’ between various actors would draw attention to synergy within GDIs and broadens the scope of analysis, which is often limited to issues such as monopoly, markets, and privatisation. In addition, the notion of ‘polycentric systems’ may help in understanding GDIs as complex adaptive systems. Fifth, to the extent that GDIs have to cope with and adapt to their respective environments, GDIs must exhibit the capacity to learn. This situated learning is essentially a social process and comes largely from participating in a ‘community of practice’. Finally, ‘new institutionalism’ may help in observing and analysing the assumed communicating, connecting and sharing abilities of GDIs and their sustainability within a unifying conceptual framework.
These different perspectives are of course not mutually exclusive and more perspectives (and metaphors) might be relevant as well. In the remainder of this paper each of these perspectives will be briefly reviewed.
GDI and barriers in communication; power positions
GDI is about communication and sharing of data and information. The ability of communication is what GDIs have in common with language. De Swaan (2001) approaches the communication potential of a language – or rather language repertoire – as the product of its prevalence and it centrality ; the product of the proportion of those who speak it among all speakers in a given language constellation and the proportion of multilingual speakers whose repertoire includes the language among all multilingual speakers in the constellation. He asserts that the resulting Q-value not only serves as a rough-and-ready measure for the communication value for the communication value of a language in a given constellation but also purports to reconstruct the ‘value’ that speakers attribute to that language; an evaluation that guides their choices of foreign languages to learn. People will prefer to learn the language
that most increases the Q-value of their repertoire. This evaluation would then be a major mechanism in developing towards constellations of languages with ever increasing Q-values and at the same time, along with this, abandoning languages with lesser Q-values. But choices of ‘foreign’ language to learn may be influenced – or rather curtailed – by other factors as well. In some former French colonies in sub-Saharan Africa for example, French not only was the language of the colonial ruler but also continues to be the language of the local elite. For French continues to be the language of all scientific and technical knowledge, of administrative and legal expertise, of political discourse, of wealth, power and prestige. The vast majority of the common people are willingly or unwillingly excluded from direct access to all this codified knowledge. The result is consolidation of the status quo of the elites as ‘gate keepers’ to this knowledge. In this manner, language is perverted from a means of communication into a means of exclusion and continued domination .
The similarity between GDIs and language as means of communication is striking. GDIs may facilitate the sharing, access to, and communication of geospatial data as this is generally suggested in literature. But like in the case of language, this potential is subject to the existing power constellation as well. Some actors may maintain their powerful position and prevent others from direct access to the GDI. In this sense, GDIs may become means of exclusion and domination.
Splintering infrastructures
GDIs are networked infrastructures and, therefore, share the characteristics and fate of infrastructures in general. In their seminal book on the urban network society, Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin (2001) discuss how contemporary networked infrastructures do not necessarily adhere to the infrastructure ideal of modernism; the ideal of rolling out monopolistic, standardised and integrated infrastructure networks to cover a city, region or country that was associated particularly with the period 1850-1960 . Instead, as they point out, modern infrastructure development generally help sustain the fragmentation of the social and material fabric of these spatial entities . Often, this fragmentation takes shape of exclusion and segregation in a struggle between different social groups and interests. For the construction of spaces of mobility and flow for some always involves the construction of barriers for others .
Graham and Marvin identify a number of factors that undermine the “collapse of the modern integrated ideal” in urban infrastructure development as they put it. These are: the ever-growing financial burden of deteriorating existing urban infrastructure (the urban infrastructure ‘crisis’); changing political economies and governance, and the retreat of the (welfare) state; the collapse of the comprehensive ideal in urban planning and the emergence of isolated projects; the physical growth and extension of metropolitan regions; and the challenge of different and competing social movements and critiques .
Many infrastructure activities generate network externalities where all users benefit when a new user joins the network because of the ability to communicate with more people . De Swaan, who considers language as a ‘hyper collective good’, makes a similar observation. The more people use a language, the more valuable it is to each one of them . But, as we have seen, existing power constellations may seriously restrain these forces. Moreover, modern infrastructure developments like GDIs potentially create the threat to individuals and groups of being marginalized and subsequently being excluded altogether from such emerging networked infrastructure.
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