Blog Post - Unit 9

The State and ICTs: E-Governance


At a time when the state is increasingly mistrusted and seen as incapable of providing essential public services given the complexity, alternative modes of governance are taking form.  In this unit, Livingston examines these alternative modes of governance and how ICTs ability to facilitate social coordination and collaboration across geographic space is replacing physical, state-based modes of social organization.  Moreover, electronic networks have various enabling properties which have the potential to activate political agency which would otherwise be latent due to "real life" spatial and temporal limitations.  Livingston mainly focuses on how ICTs empower NGOs, social movements, and TANs; and how they are supplanting and challenging state control of information.  Bennett makes the same argument, while also showing how "the same qualities which make communication-based politics durable also make them vulnerable to problems of control, decision-making, and collective identity" (Bennett 2003)

Due to personal interest (and partly because the subject is already quite well-covered in the Unit's compulsory readings by Livingston and Bennett) I will venture away from Livingston's focus on ICT's effect on the coordination of social movements, NGOs, and TANs; and look more into Livingston's question of whether, in a networked society, the state is still vital to governance.  In this post, I will highlight the flip side of that coin - that the state is still vital to governance, and is using and developing ICT tools to strengthen citizen-government interaction, increase citizen participation (as well as the government's role in private lives), and facilitate the delivery of public services.
 
This is done through "e-government", which is defined by the United Nations as "the employment of the Internet and the WWW for delivering government information and services to the citizens" (United Nations 2006).  "E-governments are fast replacing functions performed by traditional governments" (Alrazooqi, De Silva 2010)   Examples of functions include - accessing government data, encouraging the citizen to vote, filling out government forms, filing taxes, etc.  The delivery of these functions is modeled on a customer service approach, similar to how businesses operate.  And as almost 90% of the world now has mobile telephones, which people prefer to computers due to their mobility and affordability, e-governance is being extended to "m-governance".

Apart from engaging citizens, e-government is being used to engage the private sector through government-to-business (G2B) services ranging from handling corporate tax to environmental regulations.  There is also G2G e-government which is meant to streamline existing bureaucratic organization in public administrations.  This is applied to different organizations and departments within a government as well as between different countries' governments.  An example of the latter would the Schengen Information System.

E-government, and especially m-government, is still in the early stages of development and  effectiveness is of course dependent on the infrastructure as well as the opportunity structures provided by the state's political system.  The countries which scored the highest in a 2012 UN  e-government survey rankings are South Korea, Netherlands, the UK, and Denmark.  These are all countries with the most developed internet and broadband infrastructures in the world.   However, a developing country, Kazakhstan, ranks third in a survey on "e-participation" due to its government's website features that allow citizens to engage with government (United Nations 2012).

Many e-governance projects and initiatives in developing countries have been failures, due to inaccessible and difficult to understand information, low literacy, and lack of basic electronic infrastructure.  However, the widespread access to mobile phones has led to greater developments in m-governance, which is a much better suited to reach a greater number of people more effectively.  Rural communities are particular empowered by such technology because living over ten hours away from capital cities and Ministries makes face-to-face interactions impossible.  The state can provide citizens with voting ID details and local news, provide farmers with weather and commodity market updates, and warn of natural disasters - all via SMS.

Recently the Kenyan govenment launched Open Kenya (https://opendata.go.ke/), an open goverment data platform which allows citizens to compare their counties' use of resources to other counties, creating a win-win situation for government - less bureaucratic burden, greater transparency), and citizens - ease of information access, more trust in government (Crandall 2012).  The Turkish National Police uses MOBESE (http://www.turkishnationalpolice.gov.tr/mobese.html), an IT system which uses image, video, and location data to facilitate coordination between police forces and respond quickly to security situations (Ghyasi 2004).  Other examples of success with e- and m-government in developing nations can be found in the Kerala region of India (http://www.itmission.kerala.gov.in), Ghana, and Malaysia.

It is worth noting that these nations cooperate with NGOs such the World Wide Web Foundation (www.webfoundation.org) to implement e-government initiatives.  The private sector also has a watchful on these developments and are starting to play a bigger role.  Like in any public-private partnership, governments form contracts with private sector entities to deliver services related to e-governance and assume the associated risk, which relieves states of the financial burden while still leaving state regulation mechanisms intact (Kelly 2009).

 There are, of course, problems and risks associated with e-government, with the inequality in public access to ICTs being a major disadvantage, as well as the greater intrusion of the state into personal privacy.  ICTs are means to good ends as well as bad ones.  Nevertheless, while looking at these examples of how ICTs are used by states to increase their presence in areas of limited governance (due to distance, lack of resources, and obstructive bureaucracy), one sees ICTs ability to flatten the hierarchical structure and unlock the state's potential to provide for its citizens.

By Daniel Sankarsingh


References

Alrazooqi, Mansoor, and Rohan De Silva. "Mobile and Wireless Services and Technologies for M-Government Solution Proposal for Dubai Government."WSEAS Transactions on Information Science and Applications. 7.8 (2010): 1037-047. Print.

Bennett, W. Lance. "Communicating Global Activism." Information, Communication, & Society 6.2 (2003): 143-68. Print.

Crandall, Angela, and Leonida Mutuku. "M-governance: Exploratory Survey on Kenyan Service Delivery and Government Interaction." (2012): n. pag. Print.

Ghyasi, F., & Kushchu, I. (2004). "M-Government: Cases of developing countries." The 4th
European conference on E-Government, Castle Dublin, Ireland, p. 887-898

Janowski, Tomasz, Theresa A. Pardo, and Jim Davies. "Government Information Networks - Mapping Electronic Governance Cases through Public Administration Concepts." Government Information Quarterly 29 (2010): n. pag. Print.

Kelly, Tim. "Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) in E-Government." Institute for Public-Private Partnerships (IP3) (2009): n. pag. Print.

Realini, Andrea F. "G2G E-Government: The Big Challenge for Europe." Thesis. University of Zurich, 2004. Print.

"UN E-Government Survey." UN E-Government Survey. N.p., n.d. Web. 18 June 2012. <http://www.unpan.org/egovkb/global_reports/08report.htm>.