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University of South Carolina

Publication Date

Fall 2016

Program Name

Indonesia: Arts, Religion, and Social Change

Abstract

Spatial planning and mapping in Indonesia have had a precarious history for the past several decades. Laws controlling the creation of maps for land use planning have fluctuated greatly between executive administrations and the country is still struggling to create a single, unified national map. With the One Map Policy the future of mapping is optimistic, but in the meantime spatial data analyses are lacking. Geographic information systems (GIS) is a computerized system for the capture, storage, querying, analysis, and display of spatial data, and is used predominately by the government, private companies, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) across Indonesia. Community mapping, the process of sketching out and digitizing community land claims, is also quite common around the archipelago and fills an important gap of information: the local field-based perspective that is often lost when conducting GIS with remote data. This balance of perspective and relation of power are important critiques of GIS and need to be considered with every GIS-related project. Spatial planning is especially important with the onset of climate change and the worsening of Indonesia’s numerous environmental problems. Most environmentally-focused NGOs use GIS routinely because protecting the environment often means proper land use planning. The environmental NGO community in Indonesia – particularly in Bali – is tight-knit, and they often partner with each other on projects. The scope of this project was to explore the way environmental NGOs utilize GIS in their work and to characterize the network between stakeholders.

Disciplines

Community-Based Research | Geographic Information Sciences | Geography | Other Geography | Physical and Environmental Geography | Place and Environment | Urban Studies and Planning

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