Participation through communicative action: A case study of GIS for addressing land/water development in India

Abstract

Abstract. Attempts to alleviate land degradation and water scarcity in arid/semi-arid regions of India have historically been carried out within the ambit of government schemes implemented disparately by concerned departments. These sectoral methods are being increasingly replaced by a watershed-based approach in which local communities are encouraged to assume ownership of development programs, albeit within the government's overarching control. This decentralized model of governance has also in some cases had a positive impact on the more effective use of ICTs like Geographic Information System (GIS) in locally relevant applications. In this paper, the need for integrating disparate knowledge systems around GIS-based applications to mitigate land degradation, and the facilitating role of participation in achieving such integration, are discussed. It is argued that such participatory processes can be effectively enabled through communicative action whilst taking into consideration the historically existing power asymmetries. The Habermasian Ideal Speech Situation (IDS) provides a conceptual framework to argue how such communicative action can be enabled. This framework is applied to an empirical analysis of a GIS project for land management in India. The paper contributes to unpacking knowledge systems implicated in the use of GIS for addressing land degradation, foregrounding the importance of indigenous knowledge, and in espousing the crucial need to draw upon critical social perspectives in IS research.

Use and Consequences of Participatory Gis in a Mexican Municipality: Applying a Multilevel Framework

“…These findings are also in line with IS authors who stress the need to take into account macro, institutional factors, like educational process and administrative infrastructure (Walsham & Sahay, 1999) and micro, situated factors, like existing local power asymmetries (Puri & Sahay, 2003). In addition, our study has corroborated previous studies showing that combinations of different types of knowledge are likely to create a new type of hybrid knowledge that brings invaluable results when incorporated into map production (Puri, 2007).…”

“…IS researchers have targeted not just indigenous knowledge, but the ability to effectively involve different social groups in order to combine different types of knowledge (e.g., Puri, 2007 andPuri, 2003). Local community members were empowered by access to scientific and legal knowledge and university members were empowered by access to precious local, indigenous knowledge.…”

Different spaces for e-development: What can we learn from the capability approach?

“…This has two implications. First, it signifies the need for public discussions, participation, and social inclusion in the process of ICT adoption and diffusion (Heeks, 2002a;Puri & Sahay, 2003). Furthermore, the impact of ICT adoption is not to be evaluated merely in terms of the number of adopters, how well it matches the intentions of the designers, or the economic benefit it generates.…”

The Library-Community Convergence Framework for Community Action: Libraries as Catalysts of Social Change

“…Similarly, in the Village Voice project, Srinivasan (2004) observed the possibility of the system to allow community members to present themselves cohesively to outside governmental and educational institutions. This approach toward the use of "fluid ontologies" (Srinivasan and Huang, 2005) presented a method of community engagement that allowed members to build their own locally and culturally-specific structure for an information system, thereby incorporating an evolving participatory process in the representation of the information they authored (Crabtree, past research that has tried to engage marginalized publics to participate in the process, and influence the design of systems and technologies which otherwise would have been largely impositional (Puri and Sahay, 2003;Harrison and Zappen, 2003;Kanungo, 2004). Such an approach towards supporting communicative action (Habermas, 1984) in the design of information services/initiatives, as articulated by Hirscheim and Klein (1994), values open communication between community members and researchers.…”