E-Governance and Community Informatics: Developed and Less Developed Country Experiences

Issues of governance are central to the concerns of all communities and thus to Community Informatics.

Michael Gurstein, Ph.D.

Editor in chief

<gurstein@gmail.com>

How communities govern themselves, how they interact with other governance structures, how they enable (or not) participation by community members in decision making and more directly into service management and provision, how governance itself is a process of community and individual empowerment are all issues of central concern to communities and thus of central concern and areas of possible application for Community Informatics.

Much of the attention in the application of ICTs to government have been concerned with enabling the delivery of government services (e-Government). The transfer of technologies and technology and organizational strategies directly from commercial initiatives to public sector ones has been an obvious opportunity from a variety of perspectives and particularly in Developed Countries. With appropriate infrastructures in place in public sector organizations in Developed Countries based on earlier automation and digitization processes particularly as applied to back offices (internal administration), the transfer or extension of commercial technologies, and organization strategies into the management of public sector transactions and information management was a natural evolution. (Navarrete).

A limitation on this however, has been the broad inability to recognize and respond to the differences that result between a public sector which is providing service to “citizens” and the private sector which is providing service to “customers”. While customers have certain rights and powers (most notably that of withdrawing their custom from the commercial provider), citizens particularly in Western style democracies have certain statutory rights including that of insisting on transparency and accountability which would normally be required in commercial transactions. In addition, of course in most cases for public sector services there are no realistic alternatives and thus the opportunity to “vote with one’s feet or pocket book” does apply and thus the responsibility of public sector service providers is rather greater and to be held to a higher standard than for commercial service providers. (Verzola)

Less Developed Countries differ of course from Developed Countries in this area as in others notably through the absence of a developed electronic or digital infrastructure and through, in most cases, the absence of a well-developed range of publicly delivered services. Thus while in Developed Countries e-Government as applied to service delivery might be criticized for disempowering citizens by reducing their opportunity to influence services and service delivery¹ the same measures in LDC’s might be seen as a very positive development in that it may represent a significant extension of service provision to the population and the use of this implementations for service delivery to modernize and rationalize the public sector administrative and technological infrastructure. (de Jager et al, Kettani et al)

From a Community Informatics perspective there may be parallel differences as well. In Developed Countries with well-developed service delivery systems and where there is a very wide based of connectivity the development of means for effective participation by systems in public policy and service delivery planning processes can be seen quite directly in the context of the implementation of a community based ICT enabled approach (Longford and Rixon et al). In an LDC where there may be a wide variety of reasons for a very low degree of Internet access and use one might want rather more modest expectations with regard to community involvement, perhaps settling for some type of opportunity for effective comment and feedback on existing services. (Ramen, Verma et al).

The role for CI in the broad area of e-Governance as can be seen in the papers in this issue is on the one hand to keep a gentle but a continuing pressure on those designing and implementing e-governance systems and services to ensure that the needs of the citizens are foremost in their work and on the other to ensure that as CI approaches are implemented at the community level to recognize that e-governance is one of the necessary applications and areas of priority to which attention must be paid. As we move into an environment where there is an ever broader degree of e-governance activity and where in parallel there are ever greater opportunities for community use and community empowerment through ICTs the manner in which these are applied in the fundamental area of the operations of governance and the service delivery outputs of public sector activity must remain uppermost as priorities.