Geo-Information Tools, Governance, and Wicked Policy Problems

The emblematic intergovernmental Group of Earth Observations (GEO) sees food, water and energy security, natural hazards, pandemics of infectious diseases, sustainability of key services, poverty, and climate change as societal challenges [1]. In response, GEO is developing an infrastructure of earth observing systems, hardware, and software tools to connect the demand for geo-information with the supply of vast data about the Earth. At the same time, think tanks like the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) observe the complexity and unpredictability of global economic, social, and political developments and develop guidelines to plan and strategize against the odds [2]. We regard the abovementioned societal challenges as wicked policy problems [3]—involving multiple or unknown causes, anticipated and unanticipated effects, and high levels of disagreement among governance stakeholders concerning the nature (and even the existence) of a problem and the appropriateness of solutions. In this Special Issue, we attempt to take the pulse of how we, as geo-information scientists, tackle wicked problems in the global North and South. To get a sense of the number of published articles on the key themes of the Special Issue, we searched the Web of Science for “Tools” AND “GIS” AND “Governance”. Figure 1 shows the distribution of the 87 hits. Searching for Methods or Concepts, instead of Tools, brings about 62 and 23 hits, respectively, with a similar distribution. The upward trend in the number of articles in the last few years testifies to a growing interest in the problem and suggests an emergent integration of the “technical” and “social” research clusters in GIScience, which were operating in isolation in the past [4].