Abstract
Once confined to paper, national cartographic projects increasingly play out through spatial data infrastructures such as software programs and smartphones. Across the Global South, foreign donor-funded digital platforms emphasize transparency, accountability and data sharing while echoing colonial projects that consolidated state-based territorial knowledge. This article brings political geography scholarship on state and counter-mapping together with new work on the political ecology of data to highlight a contemporary dimension of territorialization, one in which state actors seek to consolidate and authorize national geospatial information onto digital platforms. We call attention to the role of data infrastructures in contemporary resource control, arguing that territorializing data both extends state territorialization onto digital platforms and, paradoxically, provides new avenues for non-state actors to claim land. Drawing on interviews, document review, and long-term fieldwork, we compare the origins, institutionalization and realization of Indonesia and Myanmar's ‘One Map’ projects. Both projects aimed to create a government-managed online spatial data platform, building on national mapping and management traditions while responding to new international incentives, such as climate change mitigation in Indonesia and good democratic governance in Myanmar. While both projects encountered technical difficulties and evolved during implementation, different national histories and political trajectories resulted in the embrace and expansion of the program in Indonesia but reluctant participation and eventual crisis in Myanmar. Together, these cases show how spatial data infrastructures can both extend state control over space and offer opportunities for contesting or reimagining land and nation, even as such infrastructures remain embedded in local power relations.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 102651 |
| Journal | Political Geography |
| Volume | 98 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Oct 2022 |
Funding
OneMap Myanmar faced challenges that stemmed, in part, from a lack of government commitment, coordination and incentives for engagement. The Centre for Development and Environment (CDE) at the University of Bern, Switzerland won the tender as the technical implementation agency behind OneMap Myanmar in 2015, funded by an eight year, eight million swiss franc grant from the Swiss Agency for Development Cooperation. This technical team worked closely with members of the government, but there was no centralized agency to support the project, and policies such as the Boundary Law and the draft Survey Law discussed under the NLD Government appeared to conflict with OneMap's goals by siloing data while effectively making non-government mapping initiatives illegal. A sprawling institutional apparatus governed OneMap. To implement the National Land Use Policy, in early 2018 the National Land Use Council (NLUC) was established by Presidential notification 15/2018. 9 9 The NLUC established four working groups, with the National Land Information Management System Establishment Working Committee overseeing the OneMap Myanmar project. 10 10 The working committee approved project activities, however, in practice it was the Myanmar-based CDE staff who set up the digital platform, while preparing civil servants to contribute government data. In subsequent phases, OneMap planned to set up a technical unit staffed by representatives from different government departments to carry out tasks and facilitate collaboration.
| Funders | Funder number |
|---|---|
| Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation |
Keywords
- Critical cartography
- Data infrastructures
- Indonesia
- Myanmar
- Political ecology
- Territorialization
