|
|
|
Can Participatory-GIS Strengthen Local-level Spatial Planning? Suggestions for Better Practice
The ‘Why’ question:
Purposes & Intentions of Promoting 'Participation' in Spatial Planning
Participation has to be examined not just in terms of the procedures and activities by which it is operationalised, not just as the intensities or ladders of participation, but also in terms of the intended functions. There is a submerged contradiction in the participation concept, in that participation is always promoted and guided, if not even directed, by someone whether within the local community, or more often from outside. What is the intention of the actors who are ‘promoting’ this Participation?
The intensities of 'participation' (Sect. 3 above) can be related to fundamental differences in three underlying purposes or intentions of the agencies (external or internal) that are ‘pushing’ participation as a strategy and promoting PSP.
Facilitation
"Participation" is promoted in order to make it easier to introduce an outside project/ programme for the facilitation or lubrication of "external" projects. This is in order to improve external project efficiency, co-opt communities into supporting an outside project, and/or to pass (a share of) the burden of costs onto the "beneficiaries"
In GI and P-GIS terms, facilitation could mean the elicitation of local knowledge of ITK and NRM, using local school children for participatory map-making, or providing assistance with handling GPS and mapping for baselines and on-going monitoring.
Empowerment
At the other extreme, ‘participation’ is promoted in order to encourage and reinforce local decision-making and local responsibilities to lead towards eventual empowerment of local peoples, as moves towards more equitable social redistribution, to empower weak groups in access to, and control over, resources, and to promote people's initiative, local control, and ‘ownership’.
In GI and P-GIS terms, empowerment subsumes the activities already listed under facilitation and collaboration, but more importantly, it refers to self-determination and local initiative in all stages of P-mapping and GIS.
Collaboration or Mediation
"Participation" is promoted in order to make links between outside projects and local people and their priorities in order to create collaboration between "external" purpose and "internal" demands. This is in order to increase project/programme effectiveness, build up capacity of local beneficiaries, and to modify or redirect outside interventions towards local needs, aspirations, and resources.
In GI and P-GIS terms, collaboration implies not only the activities listed under facilitation, but also the participatory assessment of needs, collaborative spatial problem analysis, and joint prioritising of problems and interventions, etc.
The ‘Who’ Question -
Stakeholders, Partners and Power
Good practice in P-GIS is determined by essential parameters of participation.
- Who is participating in the P-GIS?
- Who handles and analyses the data and information? Is there open access to the instruments?
- Who uses, and, Who has access to, the outputs?
- Who can use the GI? Who controls the types, analysis, and uses of, spatial data and knowledge – at What stages?
But the real issue is not: Who is participating, - but How? To answer that P-GIS is “controlled by a community or an NGO, or by local civil society”, is not sufficient – there are significant power differences and control mechanisms within these. Is it the individual, the household, or the community that is participating? If the household, is there an equitable status between men and women in the household? or, between the adults, children and old & sick? In the community, or NGO representing the community, where do these people pop up from, how are they (s)elected?
GIS’s goal is pattern recognition, which is a long way short of understanding process. “… GIS is good at patterns, but not at processes or relationships. (Abbot et al. 1998, 31). GIS does not show power, the technology is not really capable of in-depth understanding about fundamental power relations within communities. As Haklay & Harrison (2002, p.15) found, their survey respondents in London “showed a healthy scepticism of the ability of PPGIS to alter power relations. .... “ They recognised that it is raw sources - the political process, the property market, property development, - that form the delivery mechanisms of social-political power, and not information.
The outcomes of participatory planning processes are often neglected in studies of GIS, or participatory planning in general. How are the actual outcomes achieved? This is really the most important output of the entire P-GIS processes, which will impact upon people, resources, decision-making, policy actions, for considerable time into the future, but is rarely explored. Is the outcome a consensus? and, what does consensus mean in such a process? There are different views and measures of what constitutes the ‘best’ social justice solution to a conflict, - the pareto optimal, the least damaging, the median?
This becomes all the more pertinent in conflicts between powerful outsider groups, and marginalised, disenfranchised, power-deficit, inarticulate peoples (whether indigenous or other minority).
The What? Questions
Qualities and Values of Geo-Information
- What are the geo-information inputs and the output products?
- Can P-GIS (or GIS) elicit and represent cognitive space, the space of local conceptualisations and natural discourse, naďve space which is holistic, non-reductionist, non-binary, non-Euclidean?
- Can it capture and translate ‘mental maps’ of boundaries, locations and zones into geo-referenced mappable outputs?
- Does P-GIS hold abilities to build GIS into the local knowledge process?
Handling Imperfect Data and Notions of Spatial Precision
Reasoning in geographic space deals with incomplete information in the sense that people have to interpolate much missing information using ‘common sense’ rules.
Common ‘imperfect data’ characteristics are -:
- fuzzy and layered zones and zonal information (areas, polygons);
- fuzzy, blurred, flexible and multiple boundaries (line data);
- uncertain, hidden or restricted spatial locations (point data); and
- dynamics - flows of physical resources, information, ideas, flows of influence, power.
GIS does not represent well the non-exclusiveness, fuzzy boundaries and flows in real space. ‘Standard’ GIS approaches, especially those built on remotely sensed data, may place unnecessary and misleading emphasis on spatial preciseness of the output information. Most rural development activities do not need a high degree of spatial exactitude; they are concerned with communities or zones which are relatively large spatial entities, and may not have precise boundaries. Many interventions are aimed at communities of people without a unique, fixed location, such as pastoralists, students, or the “poorest 10%”. Thus, high spatial accuracy does not necessarily equate with local perceptions of resources and ‘official’ spatial data may be ‘inaccurate’ from the perspective of a villager. Moreover, the flashiness of GIS outputs can create a false precision and legitimisation of what is actually ‘bad data’. (Abbot et al. 1998)
Respect for Local Knowledge - ITK and ISK
Indigenous (spatial) knowledge is a measure of local community capability, it has the potential to put the community on equal status with outsider ‘experts’, and may be the only resource that local groups, especially the ‘resource-poor’, have ownership.
IK and scientific knowledge are not always so different.
Much ISK is similar to scientific knowledge, e.g. pest management, hunting, soil and water conservation, ethno-veterinary and ethno-medicine. ITK/ISK might even be considered more accurate because it embodies generations of practical knowledge, and is working in interactive, holistic systems.
Examples: Interpreting RS images of land capability with Bedu shepherds in Jordan (Patrick 2002); ITK of grazing lands in Burkina Faso (Sedogo 2002); Senegal River valley: comparison between farmers’ and scientific soil classifications (Tabor & Hutchinson 1994); Australia: mapping ITK of valuable vegetation types (Bartolo & Hill 2001)
Beyond this, there is ISK that is cognitively different from scientific knowledge. This IK is symbolic and visionary, (mystical in ‘scientific’ terms), and especially related to land and land features. The sense of place associated with particular localities by particular groups of people in their mental maps is qualitative, fuzzy, and metaphorical, not reductionist, not necessarily in Euclidean space, nor vectorisable. People deal naturally with overlapping, layered zones and zonal information (areas, polygons, raster grids); with fuzzy, blurred, flexible and multiple boundaries (lines), and with uncertain, hidden or restricted spatial locations (point data).
Respect for People’s Cognition and Conceptualisation of Land
ISK is specific and dynamic knowledge about the land and land resources and indigenous people’s management of them. It is both problem- and solution-oriented, it sets people in their environmental context by describing activity-spaces and responsibility-spaces, and it uses a language understood locally.
Land and place have deep, visceral, cultural values, rather than the simple economic categories of ‘high value’, ‘marginal’, or ‘wastelands’. The sense of place associated by peoples in perceptual or mental maps, is qualitative, fuzzy, metaphorical, emotional, - holistic, not reductionist. This deep conceptualisation, with its obligations of stewardship of the land, together with the location- and resource-specific, problem-oriented ITK, determine the depth and the manner of local people’s participation.
Equity - Gendered Space
ISK has a gender component. Command over space is a fundamental source of social power; and conversely, limited access to certain spaces relatively disempowers groups of people, most commonly, women. Gendered space refers to the specialised gendered knowledge of distributions in space, the differential access to, ownership of, and use of, resources, and the nested scales of cultural and economic landscapes associated with the life experiences of men & women. Similar mobility differences are mirrored in the restrictions, and thus “invisibility”, of the large proportion of housebound, non-car owning women in the US or Europe.
|
|
|