FoxHershockMappingCommunities

BUILDING LOCAL CAPACITY IN USING SIT
FOR NATURAL RESOURCE MANAGEMENT IN EAST SUMBA, INDONESIA
as successful in encouraging them to “tell their own stories”
through “their own maps.” The problem emerged from the
fact that these exercises emphasized two general areas:
1) learning how to produce maps, and 2) ensuring that
community members participated in documenting
information embedded in the maps. Less attention,
however, was given to map socialization, the process of
learning how to use maps or map making for addressing
tangible concerns of the community.
Villagers were only interested in joining participatory
mapping activities if they felt these activities would
ultimately benefit them. While activities using sketch maps
could engage villagers in meaningful conversations
regarding the use of maps and map-making to advance
their practical needs (e.g. field planting, negotiation with
neighboring farmers), participatory mapping exercises
undertaken by the project could not achieve the same
result for two reasons. First, it was difficult for villagers to
conceive of the ways that maps could benefit them when
they struggled to understand technical maps. Second,
these “technical” maps were intended to be used as tools
for negotiation with the state, and the process of such
negotiations was both abstract and removed from the
villagers' realm. At the end of the project, in spite of
participatory mapping activities that were conducted in
fifteen villages, the conceptual understanding of villagers as
to how the maps can assist them in managing their
resources remained limited.
Training and Organizational Dynamics
While a short training session might be sufficient to
introduce NGO staff and community members to the use of
simple SIT tools such as compasses, measuring tapes, and
GPS units, understanding how to plot and analyze the data
is more complex and therefore requires more time. Digital
data processing requires not only more skills and analytical
capability, but also the capacity to work with multiple
sources of data, to choose from a variety of software, and
to keep up with the (rapid) development of computing
technology. The consortium's strategy was therefore to
focus on developing the capacity of a few consortium staff
members and to have external supports available for
periodic consultation or outsourcing.
Yet it soon became apparent that even this selective
strategy could not keep up with the development of GIS
technology and the growing market segmentation among
the various GIS software producers. To illustrate, in 1996 a
WWF staff member attended basic GIS training in
Samarinda that was organized by the Idrisi software project
of Clark University. In this training, participants learned how
GIS could help community-mapping processes. It included
developing skills to use field data as inputs to GIS,
preparing and printing graphical representations, and
producing final maps using Idrisi. Unfortunately, it turned
out that Idrisi GIS software was not widely used in
Indonesia, therefore limiting the capacity of this individual
for sharing data or technical support.
In 1998 staff members from two organizations that belonged
to the consortium attended a six-week GIS and remote
sensing training course at the East West Center in Honolulu,
Hawai'i. This was followed by a series of field mapping
exercises held in Nusa Tenggara involving the same trainer,
trainees, and a few other people. 2 The objectives of the
exercises were to establish benchmarks, to map village
boundaries, and to map land cover using a combination of
satellite images and field data obtained from participatory
mapping. These activities went well and produced a series
of maps showing village boundaries and land covers.
But the strategy of focusing capacity development on a few
key individuals is vulnerable to arbitrary personnel changes,
which can arise from personality conflicts or from personal
decisions. In this case, a key staff member who had
received intensive GIS training in Honolulu in 1998 decided
to leave his organization in 1999. The other trained staff
member received a promotion to lead a provincial branch
of his international NGO and could not be involved in
mapping activities anymore. Other locally trained staff
members who had become proficient in GIS analysis also
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