GIS Technology in Natural Resource Management: Process as a Tool of Change

Abstract

Natural resource management in the United States has experienced dramatic change since landmark legislation in the 1960s and 1970s ultimately brought about high-visibility policy decisions on the public lands of the Pacific Northwest in the 1990s. The socio-political trajectory of that change has moved from institutionally imposed, agency-based decisions toward greater public involvement, increasingly calling upon new technologies to analyse data and communicate scientific findings. An investigation of the use of GIS technology in public involvement in the Coastal Landscape Analysis and Modeling Study in western Oregon finds that use of this technology plays a potentially transformative role that can encourage further movement along this social change–based trajectory but can also constrain it. Use of the technology can constrain change by increasing awareness of uncertainty and by supporting the development of privileged knowledge as held by GIS map-makers, typically scientists. It can encourage change by supporting broader kinds of inquiry and data input, reducing the effects of epistemological differences between scientists and non-scientists, and enhancing the story-making capacity and imagination of all stakeholders. In these respects, the use of GIS technology carries some potential to shift power relationships among scientists and non-scientists participating in the creation of new knowledge. Lasting change along these lines takes time, requiring the building of mutual trust and suggesting that the process of using GIS to analyse and describe landscapes can itself become a tool of change.