|
|
|
The changing paradigm of rural governance for sustainable development: Defining the niche and role of GIS
4. Challenges for GIS development
GIS used in top-down and bottom-up approaches to rural governance need not be mutually
exclusive nor mutually incompatible. On the contrary, these two approaches should
complement each other, to bridge the gap that often occurs between the intentions of the
people who govern and needs of those they govern. The increasing decentralization of rural
governance would increase the possibility for this to happen.
However to enable it to happen, the local authorities must have the capacity and capability to
use these tools, and also the tools must be made simple enough for their routine use. This
poses new challenges for GIS development.
4.1 Handling “imperfect” data
Present geographical information systems are designed for capturing formal, scientific data,
and are fastidious about topological integrity and geographical completeness before spatial
analysis can be performed on them. Good, quantitative georeferenced data about rural space
are very sparse, especially in developing countries, and are difficult, time-consuming and
expensive to collect. A lot of information about rural space, including local knowledge, lacks
the precision of representation that is required to be captured into and used in computerized
geographical information systems. There is still scope for developing more “intelligent” GIS
software that can mimic the visual recognition flexibility of human observers, who are more
tolerant of and can still derive useful knowledge from “imperfect” data. One can conceive of
geographic data capture software that allows someone to sketch out on-screen a mental map,
however imperfect, ask a few simple questions, and is intelligent enough to translate the
sketch into a spatially coherent representation of the real world as interpreted by the user.
A step further is GIS development would be then to combine the information content from
sparse quantitative (or “hard”) data with that from qualitative and informal (or “soft”) data
that are relatively inexpensive to collect and may have high local relevance. For example it is
expensive and time-consuming to collect sufficient good quantitative data that can represent
the spatial heterogeneity of rural environments, which is an important and relevant
characteristic that people who are dependent on natural resources recognize, have to live with
and manage. This sparse quantitative data can be augmented by local knowledge if techniques
are developed to use these two sources of data meaningfully (Oberthur and Kam, 2000).
Further developments to facilitate the combined use of hard and soft data would contribute
immensely to building knowledge about rural space relevant for effective governance.
Lastly, present geographical information systems are also still not good at handling
uncertainty in data. Software that do, by incorporating probabilistic statistics and fuzzy
mathematics (Simonovic, S.P., 1997), are still cumbersome to use. Intelligent systems that use
fuzzy logic and produce outputs that are easy to understand and interpret have yet to emerge.
4.2 Bringing the science to the rural poor
It is important to demystify GIS in order to bring it within the reach of the rural poor. It is
necessary to dispel the notion that GIT can only remain in the realm of highly trained experts,
to be looked upon in awe by the uninitiated and the illiterate. This requires a change in
mindset of GIS practitioners to recognize that their role is to facilitate the use of GIT as a tool
to address practical problems of people. There can only be effective use of the tool if the
people who are to benefit get a better insight on how it can be of relevance and use to them; or
better still, if they gain confidence in using it themselves. In applications for rural governance,
the target users come from all levels of institutional and social hierarchy, from government
and from civil society. It is important that GIS practitioners know how to offer this
technology appropriate to each of these levels.
|
|
|