When facing local environmental issues, maps are a very effective tool. They can help in collecting facts about an area, bring issues to the table, allow for comparison between areas, act as a tool of communication with local decision makers, and identify key issues for action. While the maps on their own do not alter the power relationships within which communities live their lives, many studi...

In 1997 the National Science Foundation launched the Varenius Project with the aim of advancing geographic information science (Goodchild et al., 1999). Varenius incorporated three components: computational, cognitive, and societal. In a review paper titled “Geographies of Information Society,” Sheppard et al. (1999) explored the third (societal) component with the aim of introducing the key re...

Citizens are demanding greater transparency and accountability from their governments, and seek to participate in shaping the policies that affect their lives. The diffusion of the Internet has raised expectations that electronic tools may increase citizen participation in government decision-making and stop the decline of trust in political institutions. This paper brings together two relevant...

Global interest in participatory mapping described as public participation GIS (PPGIS), participatory GIS (PGIS), and volunteered geographic information (VGI) continues to grow, but systematic study of spatial data quality and sampling effects is limited. This article provides a review and meta-analysis of Internetbased PPGIS studies conducted during the period 2006–2015 (n526) to answer the fo...

Considerable effort has been directed into separate but related research foci—the study of ecosystem services and participatory mapping methods. The two research foci intersect in the mapping of placebased values, an operational form of social values for ecosystem services that uses public participation GIS (PPGIS) methods. The social valuation of ecosystem services through participatory mappin...

A Public Participation GIS (PPGIS) was developed, applied and evaluated to determine its potential to assist village communities in the management of their communal forest resources in the mountains of Nepal. It was successful in involving the community in determining their information needs, collecting data, obtaining resource information and forest management decision making. During the evalu...

Within the framework of multiple advocacy theory and elite model, an eclectic approach, the study examined citizens’ participation in public policy making and implementation with specific reference to Ngor Okpala Local Government Area of Imo State 2011-2015, with the aim of indentifying the overall impacts, benefits as well as factors hindering citizens’ participation in public policy making an...

To resolve tensions among competing sources of evidence and public expectations, health-care managers and policy makers are turning more than ever to involve the public in a wide range of decisions. Yet efforts to use research evidence to inform public involvement decisions are hampered by an absence of rigorous public participation evaluation research. In particular, greater rigour in explorin...