Community-integrated GIS for Land Reform in South Africa

This article examines the role that GIS plays in how people view, exploit, and manage their physical resource base. The research contributes to the growing Participatory GIS literature and offers insight gained from the implementation of a Community-integrated GIS in South Africa. The Central Lowveld CiGIS explored landscape politics and struggles through the inclusion of socially differentiated community spatial stories and cognitive maps in a GIS to produce representations of local and regional political ecologies. Non-hegemonic ways of knowing and exploiting nature and environment were incorporated into the multimedia GIS. The paper provides conceptual and methodological guidance for integrating local community knowledge with geo-spatial technologies. The connection, however, to local policy making proved difficult to sustain because of dramatic policy and personnel changes within national and regional implementation agencies in the transition to post-apartheid government. conventional planning projects that peripherally involve targeted beneficiaries. This is the case in contemporary South Africa, where a neo-liberal macroeconomic framework, combined with a long history of top-down and highly bureaucratic decision making, has created a planning environment that remains situated within a modernization framework. The transition to democracy in South Africa has been supported by the rapid diffusion of Geographic Information System (GIS) applications (Cinderby 1995). In South Africa, as elsewhere, GIS is frequently used for digital map production and, in some cases, stands accused of transforming bad data into impressive-looking maps. Significantly, many thriving GIS consulting agencies linked to segments of the former Apartheid State were privatized before the transition of power in 1994. As a result, the GIS industry is booming in the transition from apartheid to development, and the types of GIS applications emerging tend to reinforce traditional planning applications.2 The reinvention of modernization theory and practice in South Africa is taking place in the context of a discursive shift toward participatory forms of social change. This need not be a contradiction, as participation in practice often acts to legitimize top-down projects. But South Africa has a long history of civil society struggle and activism. As a result, it is likely that some participatory initiatives that are popular and effective will emerge and it will be interesting to see if practices of community participation in South Africa can be successfully linked with GIS applications. Macdevette et al. (1999:923) argued for such an integration: “Further investment is needed in the research and development of GIS based tools as well as information required for community participatory planning.... Community level systems can be built, with expert help, to empower people and enable officials to run truly participatory development planning processes.” This article presents research results from a recently completed GIS and Society project located in the Central Lowveld of South Africa’s Mpumalanga Province (Figure 1). The project was