Do Participatory Methods Meet Their Claim?

In this paper McCall discusses whether participatory-GIS (P-GIS) and participatory-mapping (P-mapping)
contribute positively towards the goal of achieving "good governance". He divides
the discussion into four areas he sees as the "higher purposes" of
achieving accountability in good governance:

• Legitimacy and Participation: Empowerment - McCall emphasises that not
  all P-GIS efforts incorporate the same intensity of participation. Local
  participants may be engaged in the process at 4 different levels. At the
  lowest level they are knowledge contributors, and possibly beneficiaries of knowledge. 
  At higher levels locals may act as consultants, involved decision makers,
  or, at the highest level, as initiators of locally "owned"
  activities. The higher levels of participation, according to McCall, imply
  higher levels of legitimacy, ownership and empowerment.
• Respect for Rights: for Land; for Indigenous Knowledge - In order
  to help generate respect for the interests of the local communities, McCall
  states that P-GIS should demonstrate its ability "to elicit and handle
  local conceptualisations of space and spatial values." McCall argues
  against the claim that the inherently reductionist nature of GIS
  technologies can never represent indigenous spatial concepts.
• Equity (not simply equality): Gendered Space; Community Management of
  P-GIS - McCall looks at whether P-GIS strategies support
  "disadvantaged groups, in terms of access to services and markets, or,
  protecting the disadvantaged and inarticulate with respect to laws, property
  rights." In particular McCall looks at whether P-GIS can contribute to
  representation of women's specialised knowledge and resources in a
  community.
• Competence and Effectiveness - McCall discusses whether GIS
  technologies over simplify the complexity of "fuzzy" real world
  data, thereby misrepresenting the results as more accurate than they really
  are. New GIS developments, he says, are helping accommodate this imperfect
  and fuzzy data.

From his discussion of these concerns, McCall draws the following conclusions

1. The people's involvement in the creation of map data lends legitimacy to the output results.
2. P-GIS and P-mapping allow for the representation of the interests of disparate groups to
   governing bodies.
3. P-GIS efforts should respect the rights of local people, representing both the "entitlements and traditions of people with respect to land and other
   resources."
4. P-GIS initiatives should be fairly represented to the local communities, and
   should present the local people with reasonable expectations about what the technologies can achieve.
5. P-GIS efforts should be utilised in scenarios in which they can demonstrate improved efficiency and effectiveness in achieving the programme goals.
6. P-GIS efforts should take place in a climate of transparency, where the "'governed' see the spatial implications of policies and actions and the
   'governing' receive essential feedback."