Can PGIS serve two masters?

Starting point for this paper is the interaction between local and national level interests (community and government) in spatial planning. It is widely acknowledged by (government) planning agencies that spatial knowledge from communities is useful or even vital for sustainable planning decisions to be made. In the interaction between community and government the government therefore demands or requires participatory action and information from the community to serve the community. As this interaction is a two way process the community expects government assistance and input to address their needs as well. They (communities, citizen groups, etc.) need all relevant institutions to understand and address their needs and concerns.

Discussing issues involving public participation and spatial planning is nowadays more frequently done including Participatory GIS (PGIS). Building on a lifetime of experiences with PRA and PLA (Chambers, etc.) the connection has been made in recent years with the technical realm of GIS. PGIS practice is deemed useful in many cases because of its wide range of tools and methods that can be adopted. It has proven its worth already at community level and is even in some cases set by governments as mandatory practice for development planning at community level. Thus seen as a flexible toolbox one can ask a relevant question whether the output (maps, inventories, plans etc.) of such practice can also play a relevant role in the interaction between local and national interests? If PGIS products useful for the community can be useful for (government) planning agencies as well, PGIS can be made to serve two masters at once. The question then becomes: if PGIS serves two masters can it then still serve community purposes the best way? Does serving two masters imply compromising the methods and therefore eroding the basic principles of participation?

Ideally the PGIS products would enable the local spatial knowledge (LSK) to be communicated to enhance decision making. This would “only” depend on acknowledgement and accreditation of the information enclosed and an error free translation of the LSK into formally accepted standards. It is of course this dependency that is offering many problems. First of all within PGIS practice it is well known that just representing LSK to suit community purposes is a difficult task. LSK plays a different role in each community and each has different criteria and needs. Regarding the number of different (culturally dependent) information sources, criteria and acceptability issues that are involved there is only a limited bandwidth within which one must create outputs such as maps.

This paper explores and illustrates some of these problems and dependencies and presents an interaction framework that places PGIS practice at the heart of spatial planning.