Abstract: 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.
Keywords: GIS in rural development, land degradation, India, knowledge, indigenous knowledge, user participation, habermas, communicative action, ideal speech situation