Background

tion brought together 154 people from 45 different countries and nations with practical experience in implementing Partic-ipatory GIS (PGIS). What unites these practitioners is their belief that PGIS practice (Box 1) can have profound implications for margin-alised groups in society: • it can enhance capacity in generating, managing and communicating spatial information; • it can stimulate innovation; and ultimately, • it can encourage positive social change. The tools generated and used in this practice can become interactive vehicles for networking, discussion, information exchange, analysis and decision-making. When PGIS practice first began to move from the non-digital to the digital realm in the mid 1990s, concerns arose over the feasibility of applying relatively complex PGIS tools in a participatory manner. In their paper titled ‘Participatory GIS: opportunity or oxymoron? ’ Abbot et al (1998) identified and debated the ‘benefits and problems of a participatory GIS approach’. They asked whether Geographic Information Systems (GIS) can be used by local people, ‘empowering them to influence policy decisions through owning and using the data ’ or whether ‘a “participatory GIS ” would simply be extractive’? These fundamental questions still exist, particularly for digital tools. But practitioners have now had more than a decade to develop and apply these tools, as well as t