Participatory Mapping, E-Participation, and E-Governance: Applications in Environmental Policy

This chapter focuses on participatory mapping as an e-governance tool to facilitate public participation. Public participation is a key component of democratic governance, and there is a growing reliance on digital government tools such as the internet and social networking sites and geographic information systems (GIS). This chapter focuses on public engagement using information and communication technology, namely participatory mapping, known by a variety of terms such as participatory GIS (PGIS), public participation GIS (PPGIS), and voluntary GIS. While the analysis involves use of participatory mapping related to environmental issues, the chapter brings together seminal work from various fields of citizen engagement and participatory mapping. The idea is to create one common narrative for scholars and practitioners, bringing together various terminologies, practices, and studies in participatory mapping in the environmental arena that offers a beginner\u27s frame of reference

A Strategic Benchmarking Process for Identifying the Best Practice Collaborative Electronic Government Architecture

The rapid growth of the Internet has given rise to electronic government (e-government) which enhances communication, coordination, and collaboration between government, business partners, and citizens. An increasing number of national, state, and local government agencies are realizing the benefits of e-government. The transformation of policies, procedures, and people, which is the essence of e-government, cannot happen by accident. An e-government architecture is needed to structure the system, its functions, its processes, and the environment within which it will live. When confronted by the range of e-government architectures, government agencies struggle to identify the one most appropriate to their needs. This paper proposes a novel strategic benchmarking process utilizing the simple additive weighting method (SAW), real options analysis (ROA), and fuzzy sets to benchmark the best practice collaborative e-government architectures based on three perspectives: Government-to-Citizen (G2C), Government-to-Business (G2B), and Government-to-Government (G2G). The contribution of the proposed method is fourfold: (1) it addresses the gaps in the e-government literature on the effective and efficient assessment of the e-government architectures; (2) it provides a comprehensive and systematic framework that combines ROA with SAW; (3) it considers fuzzy logic and fuzzy sets to represent ambiguous, uncertain or imprecise information; and (4) it is applicable to international, national, Regional, state/provincial, and local e-government levels