Powering Up: Revisiting Participatory GIS and Empowerment

Abstract

Since 1996, participatory GIS (PGIS) has facilitated avenues through which public participation can occur. One of the ways practitioners articulate social change associated with PGIS interventions has been to qualify success using the term ‘empowerment’. This paper explores the extent to which PGIS academic literature has utilised, defined, measured, and analysed empowerment. This research will demonstrate the degree to which PGIS has, from 1996 to 2014, appropriately and adequately taken into account the causative and direct relationship between a PGIS intervention and empowerment. This article identifies works broadly dealing with PGIS, then searches within that subset of literature for the term ‘empowerment.’ The findings are both quantitatively and qualitatively assessed to explore the trends within the PGIS literature over time and to contextualise the ways in which empowerment has been identified, understood, and articulated. We conclude with a discussion on the extent to which future PGIS research and practice has the ability to disrupt power inequalities.

Keywords:

• PGIS
• public participation GIS (PPGIS)
• participatory GIS (PGIS)
• GIScience
• empowerment

Notes

1 PGIS is inclusive of public participation GIS and participatory GIS. In our literature review we also included additional terms, as explained below.

2 We use 1996 as the start date because that was when the term public participation GIS (PPGIS) was used for the first time (Schroeder, 1996).

3 Analysing the diverse array of definitions and uses of GIS and participatory processes is beyond the scope of this paper. For an exploration of some of the terms and their unique manifestations see Cochrane et al. (2014).

4 The keywords included: Community GIS, Crowdsourcing +GIS, Citizen Science +GIS, Grassroots GIS, P/PGIS, Participatory 3D Mapping, Participatory Cartography, Participatory GIS, Participatory Geoweb, PGIS, PPGIS and Public Participation GIS. Five of these keywords did not result in matches on Web of Science: Grassroots GIS, Participatory 3D Mapping, Participatory Cartography, Participatory Geoweb, PPGIS and PGIS.

5 In addition to the year range, we specified the language as English, “all databases” searched, and used “Topic” as the search category.

6 Using the same keywords, a search on Google Scholar resulted in a total of 20 313 articles. The platform based at the University of British Columbia, Summon, resulted in 5402 matches. An analysis of the differences between these platforms and their results is beyond the scope of the current study.

7 There were 645 matches to these keywords in total. However, some acronyms, such as PGIS, have other uses (e.g. prostaglandin I synthase; personal growth initiative scale; personal grief intensity scale) and were removed (totalling 248), some matches were duplicates or not in English (totalling twenty-nine) and others were not accessible (totalling eighteen).

8 A few works composed most of these bibliographic references because ‘empowerment’ was in the title of the referred to article, such as Harris and Weiner (1998) and Elwood (2002).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Geothink Project: SSHRC 895-2012-1023.

Notes on contributors

Jon Corbett

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

Jon Corbett is an Associate Professor in Community, Culture, and Global Studies at UBC Okanagan and the co-director of the Spatial Information for Community Engagement (SpICE) lab.

Logan Cochrane

Logan Cochrane is a Vanier Scholar and doctoral candidate at the University of British Columbia.

Mark Gill

Mark Gill is a master’s candidate at the University of British Columbia.