Germany-Actor Network Theory to Understand Collaborative Decision Support Systems Development in Forest Management Practice

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Case

Has flag N/A
Has full name Actor Network Theory to Understand Collaborative Decision Support Systems Development in Forest Management Practice
Has country Germany
Has location Rheinland Pfalz (Rhineland-Palatinate)
Has responsible organisation Ministerium für Umwelt, Landwirtschaft, Ernährung, Weinbau, und Fursten
Has type of owner organization forest enterprise, national administration, research institution
Has related DSS
Has start date 17/11/2010
Has end date 31/12/2013
Has DSS development stage development, adoption
Has decision stage organization, intelligence
Has temporal scale Long term (strategic)
Has spatial context Spatial with neighbourhood interrelations
Has spatial scale Forest level, Regional/national level
Has decision making dimension More than one decision maker/stakeholder
Has objectives dimension Multiple objectives
Has goods and services dimension Market services, Non-market services
Has working group theme Participation
Has website http://fp0804.emu.ee/pdf/STSM_scientific_report_Ferretti.pdf
Has description Commonly use of Decision Support Systems is considered as a technology adoption process. However, a lot of implicit requirements are embedded in these complex tools to make them successful or fail in decision processes. Therefore it would be better to consider them as products of networks of people, other products, rules, regulations, policies, institutions, etc. Consequently developers are not only supposed to look at the output that is desired, but also at the embedding in these networks. They would thus look into the institutionalization of the decision support technology in decision and administrative processes. At the same time, they would also look into the drift of existing institutionalized methods, tools and approaches, that could move out of a network.

In this case study we use Actor Network Theory (ANT), that has been developed to understand the interaction between technology and society, to understand how DSS development could change if we would not only consider the output of a DSS. Actor Network Theory is thus an alternative framework to identify and examine the extended collection of actors and interactions associated with a collaborative DSS development process.The case study thus aimed at addressing the third FORSYS objective (i.e. to evaluate the requirements put on the development process and design of forest DSSs by the problem specific context.

A typical ANT analysis would consist of rich (not necessarily long!) account that gives "figuration" to actors (human and non-human) and what they make other actors do (their agency). The account categorizes actors as those that are unpredictable (mediators) and those that in predictable way transport meaning (intermediaries). Also it acknowledges actors that are "obligatory points of passage", "centres of calculation" and "boundary objects". It provides a systematic way or thinking to trace agency through a network of associations by focusing on oligoptica (although strictly not correct, let's call it a sub-network) that together form a panorama of the network. In doing so the account provides the means to describe and understand the stability of networks.

The central question of this case study concerned the way according to which forest DSS get institutionalized in forestry practice, in particular in the German state of Rheinland Pfalz, by means of a project called ReFoRP.

In the ReFoRP project there is an ongoing forest planning process that has a high degree of predictability but, since new technologies and tools (web-based collaborative Decision Support System, ILWIS, Community Viz, touch tables) are being introduced in the current planning practice, as well as results of studies on climate change, it is particularly interesting to study the consequences of this innovation.

The most important results of the case study consist in: (i) the study of the Actor Network Theory (Latour, 2005) and in the subsequent organization of its key concepts into a table with definitions and examples of the fundamental concepts; (ii) the systematization of the information concerning the planning and decision-making process in the ReFoRP project until February 2013.

We thus developed a sort of meta study of the process by identifying the actors involved and the relations among them. This “panorama” has been shown to the experts from the different sections in the Ministry who have contacts with external agencies and organizations during the meeting that was held on the 19th of July in Koblenz. This lead to an understanding of the gaps existing in the embedding of the DSS into the process and to the formalization of this into a comprehensive diagram in October of 2012. It outlined how results from two different climate change projects (i.e. impact assessment of climate change on various tree species and web-based spatial evaluation software) are to be integrated and by whom. There are still considerable steps to be made towards the actual use of these products, but dynamics of institutionaliztion and drift are being captured.

Has reference Latour B. (2005), Reassembling the social: an introduction to Actor Network Theory. Oxford University Press, New York.

Yin R.K. (2009), Case study research, design and methods. SAGE Publications.

Websites:

http://www.forestclim.eu/ (EU project in which the development took place)

http://www.youtube.com/user/OpenSpatialDecisions (site where DSS demos are posted)

http://fp0804.emu.ee/pdf/STSM_scientific_report_Ferretti.pdf (full report including a picture of the "panorama")

http://www.stswiki.org/index.php?title=Actor_network_theory (methodological reference)

Has wiki contact person Luc Boerboom
Has wiki contact e-mail l.g.j.boerboom@utwente.nl
Has DSS development Germany-Actor Network Theory to Understand Collaborative Decision Support Systems Development in Forest Management Practice.Description of DSS development
Has decision support techniques Germany-Actor Network Theory to Understand Collaborative Decision Support Systems Development in Forest Management Practice.Decision support techniques
Has knowledge management processes Germany-Actor Network Theory to Understand Collaborative Decision Support Systems Development in Forest Management Practice.Knowledge management process
Has support for social participation Germany-Actor Network Theory to Understand Collaborative Decision Support Systems Development in Forest Management Practice.Support of social participation
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