Geographic Information Science: a Step Toward Geo-governance Solutions

Introducing geo-knowledge into traditional e-government can improve land-use governance. It can help citizens perceive the state of the environment and more readily accept constraints on land use and planning strategies. It obviously implies the availability and usability of good Geographic Information (GI). The main aim of this paper is to improve the introduction of the concept of geo-governance, or GI-based land-use governance. Growing interest in Geographic Information and the success of Geographic Information Systems (GISs) have stimulated the development of new application fields, technologies, hardware and software to meet a very wide range of requests from both the scientific research community and environmental policymakers. This paper describes the results obtained with GIS applications in a geo-governance study. By analyzing theme maps, it is often possible to find solutions to critical situations - environmental, social, economic or otherwise - involved in land-use management. Starting with some local examples, the paper discusses the real possibility of planning and managing land use with the aid of innovative, GIS-based tools for monitoring, collecting and analyzing different kinds of data, such as geo-information, socioeconomic data and information on cultural resources. The paper stresses also the opportunities that GIS offers to use knowledge about what is really happening, highlights the possibilities of exploiting technological and academic potentialities for land-use planning, and augurs the diffusion of GIS as a way to bridge the gap between the production and use of knowledge.