Community Participation and Geographic Information Systems - Chapter 18

Chapter 18 Implementing a community-integrated GIS: perspectives from South African fieldwork Trevor M. Harris and Daniel Weiner 18.1 INTRODUCTION A conceptual framework for PPGIS has been well developed during the last decade, and several crucial elements of both the public participation and GIS components have been identified (Abbot et al. 1998; Obermeyer 1998). Until quite recently, however, there were few examples to demonstrate how the implementation of PPGIS might actually proceed (Craig et al. 1999; Talen 1999). The purpose of this chapter is to identify one such approach based on fieldwork undertaken in Mpumalanga Province, South Africa. It was in addressing the complexities of PPGIS implementation that we coined the term community-integrated GIS (CiGIS), intended to represent a slightly different mode of PPGIS implementation than that previously envisaged (Harris and Weiner 1998). In this chapter, we briefly outline the basic con-cepts behind CiGIS, and present an application in support of land and agrarian reform in South Africa. 18.2 GIS, SOCIETY, AND PPGIS Early thoughts about PPGIS implementation envisaged placing a GIS into the hands of communities almost as a counterpart to the systems operated by public and private agencies. In our fieldwork in South Africa, we quickly rejected this approach as infeasible and shifted to a CiGIS orientation. To provide some context for this conceptual and operational change, we now identify several key issues raised in the literature on GIS and society, and explain how they impacted our attempt to connect community participation with a GIS. First, and perhaps foremost, was the issue of how to address or overcome differential access to hardware, software, data, and expertise. Much of the discussion on this topic in the literature was strikingly played out during our work in transitional South Africa (Harris et al. 1995; Weiner et al. 1995). Many communities in the case study area were struggling to acquire © 2002 Taylor & Francis Implementing a community-integrated GIS 247 basic necessities of life such as water, shelter, food, and fuel. Most commun-ities did not have access to electricity, and education had been deliberately withheld. Despite the tremendous enthusiasm and desire of local commun-ities to participate, the chronic and endemic problems of community access to basic resources in Mpumalanga Province necessitated a GIS implemen-tation strategy that drew upon GIS capability, support, and willingness from outside the communities themselves. In this case, a project team from West Virginia University (WVU), in collaboration with the South African Department of Land Affairs, filled this role. Second, the issue of structural knowledge distortion in post-apartheid South Africa became of paramount concern in developing a community response to land and agrarian reform. The major central government and provincial agencies of the apartheid regime had fully embraced the new technologies of GIS and remote sensing, and under government mandates had operated them in support of an oppressive state regime. Digital spatial data were available from these agencies, but they were unreliable and expensive to purchase. Some of the data were also deemed confidential and were not readily available. Some data simply had not been collected. For example, land claims are a major component of the post-apartheid land reform process, yet no official documentation of forced removals exists. The overlapping tribal and community land claims that we encountered suggests several phases of forced removals occurred, none of which were officially recorded or documented. Thus, the data collected by the state, the available geo-spatial databases, and their content were representative of the goals of an apartheid state, and reflected the conceptions of space of an ‘elite’ (predominantly white) sector of society. These factors highlighted a third area of concern frequently discussed in the literature: the desire to complement ‘official’ and ‘expert’ digital spatial information with local knowledge held by members of the community. Seeking to redress structural knowledge distortion through the inclusion of local knowledge held by members of black communities themselves thus became a primary challenge of the project. Much of a community’s know-ledge is heavily qualitative in nature and invariably based on oral history and the experience of having lived in a place for some time. Capturing this knowledge in a GIS that relies heavily on the spatial primitives of point, line, and polygon and the quantitative ordering of information is no easy task. These issues forced us to address both qualitative and quantitative aspects of local knowledge acquisition, and the integration of this knowledge into a GIS. Fourth, it is erroneous to think of local knowledge as homogenous or uniform. In many respects, it would be better to use the term ‘knowledges’ as a way of recognizing that community information is varied and socially differentiated (Mahiri 1998). In seeking to include local knowledge within a GIS, the problems of identifying and incorporating the socially differenti-ated perspectives of community participants had to be confronted. Doing so © 2002 Taylor & Francis 248 T. M. Harris and D. Weiner explicitly acknowledges the very real and constraining problem of differen-tial access to information, and underscores that in many instances the focus of PPGIS may well be to address and ensure that the varying perspectives of community members are incorporated into a GIS. 18.3 CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK FOR THE SOUTH AFRICA CiGIS The South Africa CiGIS is guided by three broad conceptual principles: popu-lar community participation; local, social and spatial differentiation; and regional political ecology. Community participation has become a mantra in development planning and field-based academic research. Unfortunately, most participation associated with development planning is essentially participation as legitimization. Community meetings are held, local input is gathered, reports are produced, and top-down planning is maintained. In this context, participation helps to legitimize decisions that are not necessarily ‘popular’ within impacted communities. In the academic world, participation has come to designate a configuration of qualitative methods designed to understand complex social processes better than conventional quantitative or qualitative methods. Efforts to hear the voices of ‘ordinary’ people and ‘capture local knowledge’ are well intentioned, but in many instances these are forms of participation for publication, in which academics under-take research to produce books and journal articles while leaving the subject communities with little (if any) tangible benefits. Popular participation is an attempt to locate community participation in the context of particular local configurations of power within civil society. Participatory processes become part of the structures of everyday life, and ordinary people are able to express their opinions as openly as possible. The South African CiGIS has its roots in a participatory land reform project initiated in 1991 during a period of intense political struggle and violence (Levin and Weiner 1997). As a result of our participation in that project, we are known in the community and viewed as friends and advocates of pop-ular local causes. The participatory process is thus central to our work, and the issues addressed in the CiGIS are community issues that have significant local importance. CiGIS implementation assumes, therefore, that tangible community needs are being addressed and that the project is political by its very nature. Our conceptual and methodological framework for CiGIS development and implementation also assumes social and spatial differentiation. As sug-gested above, communities are not homogenous and GIS can inadvertently maintain unequal development. In the South Africa study, spatial differenti-ation is represented by the inclusion of diverse forms of participant social groups, including land reform organizations, peri-urban former homelands © 2002 Taylor & Francis Implementing a community-integrated GIS 249 groups, farmworkers, large-scale (white) commercial farmers, and local chiefs. Race- and gender-based forms of social differentiation are also included in the South African CiGIS, and age, class, and other forms of difference will be added to the analysis in the future. The South African CiGIS is also guided by an appreciation of regional political ecology. This conceptual framework helps researchers to analyse the social histories and landscape politics of the participant communities, and to reflect on their own academic interests in these areas. Our relation-ship with these South African communities began in 1991 when community elders explained how grand apartheid social engineering had dispossessed them of land, water and biomass resources in their former Lebowa home-land. The contemporary poverty of these groups was clearly linked to the historical geography of forced removals and to the production of local and regional apartheid geographies. 18.4 MPUMALANGA CASE STUDY The Mpumalanga Province is a transitional area between the relatively cool and moist highveld plateau (over 1200 m in altitude) and the hot, dry lowveld (200–600 m in altitude). Mean annual rainfall ranges between 400 and 700 mm in the lowveld and between 1000 and 1500 mm on the escarp-ment and parts of the highveld. These environmental features, combined with the history of forced removals and forced urbanization under colo-nialism and apartheid, have produced a landscape of extreme social and ecological variation. The total population of the Province is over 3 million, of whom one-third live in urban areas and almost half reside in the former homelands. The case study area, the Central Lowveld subregion, is located mainly within the Lowveld Escarpment District of Mpumalanga Province, and includes a small portion of Bushbackridge to the north (Figure 18.1). The latter is disputed territory in Northern Province, and includes portions of the former Lebowa and Gazankulu homelands. Intensive and exotic industrial forest plantations and large-scale commer-cial fruit and vegetable farms dominate the western third of the case study area. Some of these are located on highly arable land. Forestry companies control large tracts of state land, and this raises substantive issues regarding socially and ecologically appropriate land-uses. Forest plantations and large-scale commercial farms thrive because of a highly skewed system of water access. During the apartheid era, the social production of this watershed was centred on a complex system of dams and tributaries that capture valuable water for (mostly white) large-scale commercial farms (Woodhouse 1997). The former homelands of KaNgwane, Gazankulu, and Lebowa are located east of the agriculture and forestry plantations. These bantustans are overcrowded and poorly serviced relics of grand apartheid. Land demand is © 2002 Taylor & Francis 250 T. M. Harris and D. Weiner Figure 18.1 The Central Lowveld case study area, South Africa. high, water is in short supply, and the history of forced removals remains fresh in peoples’ memories and imaginations. Historically, political struggles have been connected to the decline in access to land, water, and biomass resources (Levin and Weiner 1997). The Kruger National Park and several private game parks occupy the eastern portions of the case study area. Since 1994, tourism has again become a growth industry, and visitors to the Mpumalanga and Northern Province Lowveld are growing. The use of land for game tourism has generated interesting discussions within the region regarding the potential for community-based range management models. © 2002 Taylor & Francis ... - tailieumienphi.vn