Issues related to improving community participation and the effectiveness of green economy instruments are central to current debates regarding progress towards sustainable development. Information technology, such as Geographic Information Systems, may be able to play an important role in addressing these challenges. In this study an experiment with introducing geospatial technology was conducted with four rural communities at different levels of engagement with institutional frameworks of payments for ecosystem services in Chiapas, Mexico. The purpose was to examine the impacts of such an intervention and evaluate whether it had the potential to enhance collective understanding of natural resource management practices, lead to better shared decisions and enhance community social capital. By exploring the outcomes it was also possible to assess the conditions that enable or constrain such implementation processes. Five key themes (i.e. social structure, IT skills, participation in development, external relations and power structures) were identified in an evaluation framework informed by actor-network theory concepts, and these guided the collection of evidence and data analysis. The results indicated that all of these factors had some influence over the success of geospatial technology analysis transfer, with community political decisionmaking processes and previous involvement of external agents in local natural resource management activities being of particular importance.