Introduction
Fundamental concepts | Market or rationalist-analytic model | Polis or political-discursive model |
---|---|---|
Humans | Autonomous, rational, individual actors maximising self-interest | Individuals, groups and communities do not follow a mould of consistent rationality; they display diverse values and interests and are motivated by public as well as self-interest |
Geo-information | Standardisable, formal, quantitative; mediates spatial knowledge | Can be contingent, informal, qualitative; mediates spatial knowledge and social and political power and is strategically manipulated in policy processes |
Geo-information technology | Value-neutral; drives organisational & social change | Value-laden, historically contingent; shapes and is shaped by social processes |
A conceptual framework and examples
Values
Efficiency
Objectives | Efficiency measures (outputs) |
---|---|
Facilitate widespread sharing of geospatial data by means of improved participant operations, reduced costs, and supporting cross-jurisdictional decision making | Number of visits/sessions to DataFinder website |
Number of entities visiting DataFinder | |
Number of whole or partial datasets and regional datasets downloaded through DataFinder | |
Number of entities listing metadata on DataFinder | |
Hours of data-producer staff time saved |
1.Who determines what is the correct output […]?2.How should we value and compare multiple [outputs]?3.How do different […] outputs benefit different constituencies or groups?4.How should we count inputs (e.g. labor costs) that are simultaneously outputs to somebody else (e.g. jobs for local community)?5.How should we decide which of the many benefits of any input to count in the equation?6.How should we count the virtually unlimited opportunity costs of resources used as inputs?
Equity
Dimensions of equity | Equitable distribution | Participatory GIS |
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Recipients | Who should count as a member of the class of recipients? | Redefines recipients by including resource-poor organisations and “non-traditional” users, NGOs, grassroots groups, and community-based organisations (McCall 2003) |
Item | How should the boundaries of the item be (re)defined? | Expands the item to also include multimedia strategies (digital photographs, sound files, sketch maps, etc.) and representations of diverse and vernacular forms of spatial knowledge in a GIS (Elwood 2006) |
How could the item be customised to individual needs? | “Rewires” the item (as in GIS/2) to represent different visions of place, to support cultural and multilingual distinctions, to integrate local knowledge (Sieber 2004) | |
Process | Which process guarantees fairness? | Participation as distribution process |
Practices
Coordination of data sharing
Cases | Technical redesign | Organisational redesign |
---|---|---|
SLIP: Shared Land Information Platform, Western Australia | Creation and maintenance of an integrated land-information database | Restructuring within government structures |
PSMA: Public Sector Mapping Agencies consortium, Australia | Integration of datasets held by state and commonwealth agencies | Joint venture: consortium of data producers |
GBKN: Large Scale Base Map, the Netherlands | Maintenance and dissemination of core datasets | Joint venture by key data users |
Cases | Technical–organisational reform | Sourcing doctrine | Typical justifications |
---|---|---|---|
SLIP: Shared Land Information Platform, Western Australia | Restructuring within government structures | Single source supply | Individualist (effectiveness, avoidance of confusion and deadlocks) |
Creation and maintenance of an integrated land information database | |||
PSMA: Public Sector Mapping | Joint venture: consortium of data producers | Multisource supply by the public sector | Mixed egalitarian (serves to reduce the arrogance of office) and individualist (sets up pressures to minimise costs) |
Agencies consortium, Australia | Integration of datasets held by state and commonwealth agencies | ||
GBKN: Large Scale Base Map, the Netherlands | Joint venture by key data users | Multisource supply by metaphytic competition | Mixed egalitarian (keeps the private sector honest) and individualist (keeps the public sector competitive) |
Maintenance and dissemination of core datasets |
Spatial policy making
Rules
Policies
(Diffusion of) principles and declarations
Summary
Geo-information use | Market | Polis |
---|---|---|
Values
| Values offer simple, measurable rules that determine goodness | Values contain problems of interpretation, thus becoming the object of political struggles; continuously socially constructed |
Practices
| ||
Spatial policy making | Linear relationship between high-quality geo-information and spatial policy | Political reasoning (by metaphor and analogy) more salient than scientific facts |
Coordinating sharing of geo-information | Rational actors engage in technical redesign which drives organisational change and affects data sharing | Organisational-technical reforms required for coordinating geo-information sharing shape and are shaped by social factors |
Rules
| ||
Geo-information policies | Rational policies are enacted in consultation with fully-informed governance actors | Policy ideas win over competing ideas by persuasion rather than by hard factual evidence |
(Diffusion of ) principles and declarations | Principles and global declarations are invariant as they diffuse from a centre of diffusion to adopters worldwide | Adopters “edit” principles and global declarations; they reinvent them to fit their idiosyncratic needs locally |
From a market to a polis perspective
Over-reliance on a market lens in SDI research
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Lock-in in the new public management paradigm of the early nineties: The inception in 1991 of the SDI concept by John McLaughlin, and further development by Dick Groot and other pioneers, was locked into new public management (NPM), the public management paradigm of the early nineties. Consistent with NPM doctrines (privatisation, performance measurement and public service improvement), SDI initiatives were phrased in terms of economic considerations in those early days. The emphasis was on predictability, rationality and efficiency, a key role for central government in SDI building, and harmonious collaboration between rational, autonomous, government actors.
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Disciplinary path dependence: The majority of SDI researchers have engineering backgrounds. Given specific objectives and conditions of operations, they design geo-information technology models, techniques or devices. They generate situated explanations, develop explicit inventions and propose practical solutions for problems that are contextually, materially and temporally bounded (Orlikowski and Barley 2001). Their key test is pragmatic. Their aim is to find out what works in specific circumstances and given specific design requirements, but not to explain how and why it works. Furthermore, to account for changing sharing practices, SDI researchers mostly draw from the discipline of business administration. Business administration privileges concepts promoting harmony between information technology investments and the strategic objectives of firms. This state of harmony, referred to as “strategic alignment”, requires planned and purposeful management processes to align the strategic context of a firm (and, by extension, of government organisations) with information technology.
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Lessons from the history of technology: Historians of technology teach us that technology-driven debates, such as those concerning information infrastructures, initially (and understandably) privilege a technical, rational-analytic perspective in knowledge development. Problems in this initial phase are defined in technical terms, needing technical solutions. In later stages of the knowledge development cycle, non-technological dimensions (such as who should pay for the information infrastructure, who owns it and how it should be operated) enter the picture. In an even later stage, social scientists, natural scientists and engineers form multidisciplinary teams to develop and test theories, reflecting on the intricacies of the topic at hand from multiple perspectives. Each and every stage of knowledge development is essential and centrally informs the debate, until a new set of issues comes to the fore, with different arguments, audience, principal authors, concepts and methods.
Authoritative geo-information and voluntarism
Commercial virtual globes
Geo-information voluntarism | Commercial virtual globes |
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New value contests |
Trust: Virtual globes fail to inform users when images have been removed or edited at the request of a government. Trusting commercial companies may lead to public delusion over what is happening in the world. |
Commercial values versus public interest: Image currency and resolution in corporate virtual globes reflect perceptions of market potential not of public interest. | |
Legitimacy of visualisations: When visualisations of lay people enter the public discourse or decision making, they can raise difficult value questions: who has a legitimate voice? whose visualisation is right or more legitimate? | |
Privacy versus surveillance: Live satellite feeds in commercial virtual globes in the near future will have dramatic consequences for the identification, tracking and sorting of individuals. With close circuit TV (CCTV) the controlling power of surveillance is in a few hands; with live satellite feeds, massive surveillance is available to everybody. | |
New emerging practices |
People participate earlier and offer multiple views simultaneously in planning processes, and especially in environmental issues; there is online feedback and dialogue. |
NGOs replace the moralistic rhetoric of “ought” with a technical analysis of “is”. NGOs offer technical analyses countervailing those of intelligence agencies and cause shifts in the epistemic balance of power between civil society and the state. | |
Activists consciously re-purpose mapping and satellite imagery as resistance to military secrecy. | |
Play and aesthetic performance: People derive pleasure from searching for black helicopters, engage in virtual tourism and creatively make subversive mash-ups. | |
Absence of new rules |
No global privacy standards: Google’s architecture is based on numerous data centres, each containing hundreds of servers, with each server operating under different (or no) rules in different countries. |
Reflection
“I know that the publication of NO2 maps in 2005 provoked a strong public reaction because they showed that concentration levels of NO2 above the Netherlands were too high […] Is it known to you whether the information has led to policy change in the Netherlands with respect to NO2 emissions?” (de Leeuw, November, 2008).
“Such a question is naturally not easy to answer objectively […] I do not think that the NO2 map has had direct influence on policy rules and goals […]. Also air quality policy goals have not been sharpened […] It is possible that the map has contributed to more willingness to accept measures but, I cannot substantiate this claim” (senior scientist, November, 2008, our emphasis in bold).