Enhancing Participation Through ICTs: How Modern Information Technologies Can Improve Participatory Approaches Fostering Sustainable Development

The involvement of the communities in decision-making is a key strategy to enable compliant policies. This is particularly true to foster a sustainable development. ICT systems can allow information to flow down from the government to the citizen: they create the possibility of flows upwards of information, as a citizen of government creating “feedback-loops” between “communities,” “decision-makers” and “environment” catalyzing participation empowerment and the perception of local knowledge. Even if they bring a great potential, the use ICT for development actions is not free of controversies and side effects. In particular, they regard the effectiveness of participation mediated by informative systems, the problems related to data quality, and data security. The work will offer a critical excursus of different participatory mapping approaches mediated by ICT, like public participatory GIS (PPGIS), participatory sensing and crowdmapping and how they influence the relationship between communities and lands in a vision of sustainable development.