E-Governance

E-governance is the use of the Internet and related information technologies by governmental organizations internally and to interact with citizens, firms, nongovernmental organizations, and other governments. Defined so, e-governance offers the potential to reshape power relationships between governments and citizens, particularly in those countries with widespread use of the Internet.

For citizens, the Internet opens new ways to seek and find information from government but also from a proliferation of other information sources. The Internet gives citizens access to expertise—for example, on health and education—that can rebalance information asymmetries in their interactions with public sector professionals. The Internet also reduces the costs of political mobilization and organization, strengthening civil society in ways that may increase the influence of interest groups on public policy issues in liberal democratic states. Less benignly, the usefulness of the Internet for a wide range of criminal and fraudulent activities puts pressure on states to develop further their surveillance techniques. In authoritarian states, the Internet may offer new ways in which citizens and groups can challenge state authority, for example by disseminating information about the regime across global networks or using social media to coordinate protests and demonstrations.

Conversely, e-governance may also increase the power of governmental organizations in relation to citizens. Governments in most developed nations spend around 1% of gross domestic product (GDP) on their own information systems and electronic presence. The capacity of such technologies to collect, store, and analyze personal information about citizens increases the state's ability to influence societal behavior and control citizens, with new potential for state intrusion into individual privacy even in democratic states. Authoritarian states can use Internet-related technologies to strengthen their authority over citizens through surveillance of online activity. The challenges to authoritarian regimes posed by citizen use of the Internet has led to widespread censorship and filtering of the Internet across China and most Arab states and prohibition of its use in North Korea, for example. Some states have also used the Internet to challenge the authority of other states, attacking the electronic capability of another government and waging “cyberwar.”

The extent to which power relations are rebalanced through use of the Internet will rely partly on the relative capacity of governments and citizens to innovate with technology. The Internet is perhaps the first information technology that has been used more extensively by citizens and civil society than by governments, and for this reason, there is a greater chance of citizen empowerment than from earlier technological developments, such as mainframe computer systems, the personal computer, or databases. Convergence with other popular technologies, such as mobile telephones and mainstream media outlets, accentuates this pattern, as do so-called Web 2.0 technologies, which allow users to generate their own content and to participate in large-scale collaborative networks or forums such as blogs, video-sharing sites (such as YouTube), Wikipedia, social networking sites, and so on. Governmental organizations, in contrast, have been slower to adopt these innovations, sometimes struggling to manage large information technology investments and unwieldy databases and being reluctant to embrace the informality of social networking technologies and the part-authenticated nature of the information that Web 2.0 applications provide. For this reason, e-governance may, ultimately, empower citizens relative to government.

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