Participation through communicative action: A case study of GIS for addressing land/water development in India

Attempts to alleviate land degradation and water scarcity in arid/semi-arid regions of India have historically been carried out within the ambit of government schemes implemented disparately by concerned departments. These sectoral methods are being increasingly replaced by a watershed-based approach in which local communities are encouraged to assume ownership of development programs, albeit within the government’s overarching control. This decentralized model of governance has also in some cases had a positive impact on the more effective use of ICTs like Geographic Information System (GIS) in locally relevant applications. In this paper, the need for integrating disparate knowledge systems around GIS-based applications to mitigate land degradation, and the facilitating role of participation in achieving such integration, are discussed. It is argued that such participatory processes can be effectively enabled through communicative action whilst taking into consideration the historically existing power asymmetries. The Habermasian Ideal Speech Situation (IDS) provides a conceptual framework to argue how such communicative action can be enabled. This framework is applied to an empirical analysis of a GIS project for land management in India. The paper contributes to unpacking knowledge systems implicated in the use of GIS for addressing land degradation, foregrounding the importance of indigenous knowledge, and in espousing the crucial need to draw upon critical social perspectives in IS research.