LAUSR

Summary Participatory approaches have proven effective at producing more inclusive and democratic forms of development, in which marginalized groups are given increased recognition. However, these approaches can also reinforce social hierarchies and political exclusion if they are not developed and implemented carefully. In particular, participatory approaches can be problematic if they too simplistically conceptualize democratic engagement as the folding of individuals into pre-existing governance structures. Utilizing a combination of feminist and postcolonial theories, this paper argues that practitioners of participatory methods must extend their thinking to the ways in which their projects foster engagement across multiple social and epistemological perspectives. Participatory geographic information systems (PGIS) methodologies are particularly effective at enabling these cross-perspectival engagements—geospatial technologies have unique capabilities for storing and visualizing knowledge from different types of knowledge systems. These different forms of knowledge can not only be visualized as multi-facetted and multi-scalar layers, but they can be directly placed in conversation with one another within the space of the map. In this way, they can be used to fundamentally transform historically unjust governance practices, rather than simply folding new subjects into unjust political structures. The authors examine these claims in the context of a case study with the Maijuna indigenous group of the northeastern Peruvian Amazon. The authors collaborated with the Maijuna to create and use a digital, spatial database to influence policy decisions about land tenure and environmental management. We show that geospatial technologies were uniquely capable of encouraging dialog and integration across indigenous, Western scientific, and state-based perspectives of the Amazon. These technologies are particularly effective at empowering traditionally marginalized perspectives within governance processes. This project therefore offers lessons about the benefits and dangers of geospatial technologies and methodologies for improving the democratic potential of development.