The Diffusion of GIS: A French Canadian Cross-Cultural Comparison of the Impact of National GI Policies

Public policies orientations, and especially those dealing with Information Technologies and land planning policies, have very strong impacts on national diffusion of Geographical Information Technologies and associated spatial databases. Actually, this field seems to be a very powerful way for the GIS community to improve the understanding of the relationship between GI and society (see for example the last GISOC Conference that took place in Minneapolis in June 1999). Besides, a few studies have already more or less directly explored this research topic. Recently, Lopez (1998) compared precisely how USA and European scientific and technical information (STI) policy impacts the dissemination of Geospatial databases. He shows how government information policy directly influences the availability and commercialization of public Geographical Information. But this work does not explicitly take into account the strong connections between, on the one hand, the national cultural context, the institutional organization of the national territory and the priorities of planning policies, and, on the other hand, the diffusion process and social adoption of Geographical Information at the different scales of planning activities. Nevertheless, Information Technologies and Geographic Information policies are embedded into large