FoxHershockMappingCommunities

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DEVELOPMENT OF RURAL COMMUNITY CAPACITY THROUGH SPATIAL INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY: THE CASE OF TRINITY COMMUNITY GIS wider socioethical impacts. This research project analyzes an attempt to implement a community capacity-building model aimed at empowering people to address community concerns more effectively locally, and to better represent community interests in regional, state, and national policy arenas. TRINITY COMMUNITY GIS TC GIS, an NGO in Trinity County in northwestern California, began its effort to disseminate SIT in 1993 with the goals of: (1) developing local community capacity to use SIT; (2) providing local access to and training in the use of GIS and GPS technologies; and (3) helping provide new avenues of employment to local people for SIT-related work. A further goal was to promote the use of SIT in ways that would include local knowledge and experience in planning for public and private land management and to encourage collaborative development of new approaches to landscape analysis and ecosystem management (USDA, Forest Service 1994). In sum, TC GIS has worked to enhance communications between the rural periphery, including public lands, and the administrative centers at the regional, state, and federal levels. History TC GIS emerged from a particular context of change in natural resource policy and management and of newly emerging technology. In the early 1990s, land management in the Pacific Northwest of the United States changed dramatically when a federal court injunction required the federal government to come up with a new approach to public forest management, resulting in large decreases in timber volumes harvested from public lands, which in turn created severe economic problems in forest dependent communities (USDA, Forest Service 1994). Trinity County is a 2,000,000 acre mountainous, and remote county with a population that has been stable at around 14,000 for forty years or more. Over 75 percent of the land is managed in national forests by the federal government. The shift away from timber management toward ecosystem management on public lands in this highly forestdependent county had been played up into an ugly “jobs vs. the environment” conflict situation. As a result, a group of volunteers, representing the full range of local natural resource stakeholders and the United States Forest Service, formed the Trinity Bioregion Group (TBRG), using consensus to find common ground on forest policy issues and to make recommendations regarding USFS management decisions. At the same time, SIT was beginning to become available to public agencies. The emerging use of SIT for public resource management had implications relevant to both forest management and to rural communities near national forests. First, by its nature as a form of “remote sensing” rather than on-site assessment, there was considerable potential for error in SIT application. Second, the advent of SIT led to new employment opportunities for those trained to use the technology. Members of the TBRG sought to ensure their access to GIS. In 1993, the TBRG contacted two UC-based researchers interested in testing a community capacity-building alternative to the external consultant model of SIT dissemination. John Radke and Yvonne Everett agreed to work with the TBRG, and Everett went on to become co-director of TC GIS. With coordinated funding support for a pilot project from the UC Berkeley Cooperative Extension, the California State Resources Agency, and several federal agencies, one of the researchers and two TBRG members initiated Trinity Community GIS in the small Trinity County town of Hayfork. TC GIS began building local GIS capacity by meeting regularly with a TBRG GIS committee, and by writing curricula for and teaching entry-level mapping and GIS courses that included such skills as map reading, photointerpretation, use of GPS units, digitizing, geopositioning, database development, spatial data manipulation, output development, and introductory GISbased landscape analysis. At this time, TC GIS also began a longstanding and mutually beneficial relationship with the Watershed Research and Training Center (WRTC), another 75
Hayfork based NGO focused on community forestry that had emerged in response to changes in federal land management policy. TC GIS maintained close contact with the university and established links with Shasta (Community) College, TNET (a local digital network), the USFS, local government agencies, schools, and other interested community members. Staff capacity developed gradually in parallel with efforts of the “expert” researcher to combine carrying out training courses with building a research program focused on applying GIS and participatory methods to locally identified, natural resource-related problems. Important to TC GIS's development was a grant from the USFS Pacific Southwest Research Station (PSW) for research on the USFS's Hayfork Adaptive Management Area (AMA), community GIS, non-timber forest products (NTFPs), and fire management. Other essential elements included participation in the Environmental Systems Research Institute's (ESRI) Environmental Conservation Program and the Society for Conservation GIS (SCGIS). TC GIS could not function without support from ESRI software and data grants. TC GIS also received software support from Sure!MAPS, Symantec, Microsoft, and SweGIS. Since capacity-building is in itself a process, parallels between the evolution of TC GIS as an NGO and the growth of community capacity are useful for examining the social and ethical implications of SIT, as well as TC GIS's efforts to support community use of SIT. These efforts began with explanations of and training in SIT technology and progressed to using SIT for community mapping that was used to compete for government sponsored natural resource projects and to defend resource rights in court. METHODS At the SIT Conference in Chiang Mai in June, 2003, TC GIS decided to study what impacts their implementation of SIT had upon local rural community capacities and how these impacts were manifested. We decided to do this by conducting a survey of our community “peers”–people who had worked with or been trained by TC GIS in one way or another. At the outset it must be stated that the survey was carried out by TC GIS and not by independent researchers, and thus one would expect the responses returned to be largely favorable. Further, the small sample size limits the universality of the results. In June of 2004, TC GIS designed and sent out over one hundred survey forms consisting of thirty-one questions (twenty-two multiple choice and nine text answers). When data from the thirty-two responses received were entered into SPSS software and descriptive statistics and crosstabulations were calculated, the perceived value of SIT became apparent. Responses from the 30 percent of the survey pool who participated were so overwhelmingly positive that the results merit discussion. Bearing in mind that most of the participants have had some interaction with TC GIS: • All respondents said that SIT is at least somewhat important for natural resource management, while 56.3 percent found SIT to be critically important. • When asked if their experience with TC GIS training workshops or products had made them more confident in understanding SIT outputs used in public presentations, over half agreed with another one-third citing strong agreement. • Survey responses were on the same order for Trinity County residents' increased ability to participate in discussions and decision processes in natural resources management based on the use of SIT products. • Survey responses showed 75 percent supportive of the idea that TC GIS helped county residents, public officials, and land managers be more aware of SIT and increased residents', officials', and managers' abilities to develop and use SIT. • 90 percent of respondents said that residents of Trinity County have had more access to SIT in the last ten years because of TC GIS. (When broken into two groups, one trained in SIT by TC GIS and thus 76
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MAPPINGCOMMUNITIES ETHICS, VALUES,
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TABLE OF CONTENTS vi vii viii 1 11
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ACRONYMS AMA: adaptive management a
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INTRODUCTION MAPPING POWER: IRONIC
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COMPARATIVE STUDY OF PARTICIPATORY
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Page 32 and 33: APPENDIX I: FORMAL INTERVIEWS AND G
Page 34: APPENDIX II: RESEARCH QUESTIONS AND
Page 37 and 38: land-use plans in various stages of
Page 39 and 40: egan to argue that these areas were
Page 41 and 42: conflicts. The NTFP also assists vi
Page 43 and 44: illegal logging activities and to s
Page 45 and 46: property is defined according to th
Page 47 and 48: the real outside pressure has not y
Page 49 and 50: 7. How well do NTFP staff members u
Page 51 and 52: further and further away from areas
Page 53 and 54: Methods Projecting aerial photograp
Page 55 and 56: RESEARCH QUESTIONS The underlying q
Page 57 and 58: In Samout Krom Village, villagers h
Page 59 and 60: who have not attended the sketch ma
Page 61 and 62: concrete sensorial experiences much
Page 63 and 64: CONCLUSION Based on mapping researc
Page 65 and 66: BACKGROUND According to the MIGIS p
Page 67 and 68: many schools, resulting in the clos
Page 69 and 70: members, the Beima, and villagers'
Page 71 and 72: tree cutting and animal grazing in
Page 73 and 74: the bio-gas project that was implem
Page 75 and 76: During the evaluation process we al
Page 77 and 78: 1 Mr. Zhao Yaqiao, Ms. Wu Chengrui,
Page 79 and 80: Events / Dates Bio-gas systems cons
Page 81: communities to take advantage of SI
Page 85 and 86: likely to be more knowledgeable abo
Page 87 and 88: planning processes, especially with
Page 89 and 90: and implement projects. Some NGOs a
Page 91 and 92: CONCLUSIONS SIT training provides p
Page 93 and 94: REFERENCES California Fire Safe Cou
Page 95 and 96: map strengthened the community's cl
Page 97 and 98: 1994 and 1995 with community mapper
Page 99 and 100: to the mapping. These disagreements
Page 101 and 102: CONCLUSIONS For too long now, the D
Page 103 and 104: APPENDIX B The table below lists th
Page 105 and 106: uncritically or simply misused. As
Page 107 and 108: However, the equipment acquired for
Page 109 and 110: degrees in social sciences, agricul
Page 111 and 112: photo: Martin Hardiono photo: Marti
Page 113 and 114: REFERENCES Herlihy, P. H., and G. K
Page 115 and 116: eserve boundaries, develop a common
Page 117 and 118: NGO that focused on facilitating co
Page 119 and 120: left their organizations within a y
Page 121 and 122: eadily use the available computer a
Page 123 and 124: local capacity both in terms of ski
Page 125: Nusa Tenggara Community Development
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