Public Participation GIS (PPGIS) for regional and environmental planning: reflections on a decade of empirical research

Abstract

The term public participation geographic information system (PPGIS) was conceived to describe how GIS technology could support public participation with the goal of including local or marginalized populations in planning and decision processes. Based on experience with more than 15 PPGIS studies, the central thesis of this paper is that PPGIS has not substantively increased the level of public impact in decision making because of multiple social and institutional constraints. Following a review of a decade of empirical PPGIS research, this paper explores why government and nongovernment organization (NGO) adoption of PPGIS for environmental planning decision support has lagged. Despite methodological advances in PPGIS, agency barriers to effective public participation have not been fundamentally altered by PPGIS. For PPGIS to have a sustained impact on regional and environmental planning, agencies must meaningfully encourage and involve the public in planning processes irrespective of the GIS component.