A participatory framework for developing public participation GIS solutions to improve resource management systems

ABSTRACT

Participatory approaches elicit information from multiple stakeholders while planning and implementing resource management systems. Such elicited information is often associated with significant variability. Public participation geographical information science (GIS) (PP-GIS) solutions can reduce this variability by helping stakeholders to measure the factors involved and provide the elicited information. We propose a ‘Quality Function Deployment’-based participatory framework for developing such PP-GIS solutions. It is demonstrated using a case study to enhance an existing PP-GIS into a solution for rainwater harvesting systems in Indian villages. The novelty of the proposed framework is that it identifies metrics and carries out comparative analysis of three existing solutions: participatory rural appraisal, participatory mapping and PP-GIS. In the case study, PP-GIS scored less than participatory mapping as it scored less on usability and affordability. To improve PP-GIS in these aspects, an easy-to-use mobile and web based, free and open source PP-GIS solution, Watershed GIS, was developed. It scored better than the three existing solutions and its usage resulted in substantial reduction of variability in criteria values and thus better ranking of alternatives, with the average coefficient of variation decreasing from 0.12 to 0.05.

KEYWORDS:

• Public participation
• resource management
• planning
• Quality Function Deployment
• analytic hierarchy process

Acknowledgements

Above work was supported by grant no. 5-4/2010-TE, Department of Land Resources (http://dolr.nic.in/), Ministry of Rural Development, Government of India, New Delhi. This work was carried out in close collaboration with Watershed Support Services and Activities Network (http://www.wassan.org/), Hyderabad and MS Mobile Technologies Private Limited (http://www.mspacetech.com/), Hyderabad. We thank G. Krishnamurthy, N. Chandra, P. Nagamma and other participants from the case study village for their active support in anchoring the field work. We thank the editors and the reviewers for their insightful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplemental data

The underlying research materials for this article can be accessed at http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13658816.2016.1206202:

1. Quantifiable metrics identified by experts for measuring requirements of community stakeholders and expert stakeholders.

2. Relationship between requirements and quantifiable metrics.

3. Metric-based scores of existing solutions, metric-wise targets and metric-based evaluation of various iterations of Watershed GIS.

4. Stakeholder-perceived scores of existing solutions by the community stakeholders and the expert stakeholders.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Department of Land Resources (http://dolr.nic.in/), Ministry of Rural Development, Government of India, New Delhi [grant number 5-4/2010-TE] .