Participatory Development of Planning Support Systems to Improve Empowerment and Localization

We propose a participatory development process to address critiques of Planning Support Systems (PSS) that focus on their shortcomings of the empowerment of stakeholders and the contextualization in implementation. The process we are presenting involves stakeholders from the early stage of goal-defining and model building. We evaluate an empirical application with a coupled land-use and economic impact assessment PSS for a project in a township on its added value to two criteria: inclusiveness and contextualization. Our findings show that the process enabled improved transparency and understandability on the fitness between project outcomes and stakeholder interests, while local expertise helped to revise and improve the model outcomes and parameters.