Some Novel Information Systems for the Empowerment of a Decision-Making Process on a Territory: Outcomes from a Four Years Participatory Modeling in Senegal

The Maps, the Geographical Information Systems (GIS), the Role-Playing Games (RPG) and the other participatory supports, the Multi-agent Systems (MAS): all are modeling supports designed through their conceivers' perception. Even in participatory approaches, these designing and modeling can take off towards technocratic, but often unconscious, drifts. Yet, a true empowerment of local governance means to let stakeholders and their principals totally handle their information and modeling systems. The mere access to information is certainly a first step but it is far from a true power over it, so long as this local people are not able to select, process and manage their information systems. Actually, the present fast developing use of these tools could be a threat as much as a progress for the democratization of information. These new information technologies are still often a way to reinforce technical point of view into the decision-making process. This analysis brought us to methodological experiments between 1997 and 2001 in the Senegal river area, to support a land use management local process based on a Information Systems Self-Governance. We conceived and tested novel forms of maps, Geographical Information Systems, Role-Playing Games, other participatory supports and Multi-agent Systems in a designing approach truly reversed. For all these supports, stakeholders or their local principals guided all steps of designing and modeling process. This method rests on two principles: the endogenous nature of a decision-making process that we consider always continuous and iterative; the selfdesign of the modeling tools to supply supports for decision-makers much suitable, much handy and much controllable. In this such a support of decision-making processes on territories, the technical supports are merely a sort of mediating accompaniment. The results of the four years experiment allow us to formalize a selfdesigned modeling approach, for simple maps as well as GIS, RPG and MAS supports. The outcomes also show that this sort of endogenous and self-designed participatory modeling is efficient to let an endogenous dynamic of governance come across into a bottom-up regional policy and planning, from local (2500 km²) to regional (18 000 km²) scales. In other words, a bottom-up participatory modeling and planning, more fitted with the more humble place where our post-normal Science should be in the XXIe century.