e-Government and New Technologies:
Towards better citizen engagement for
development
SESSION Four - New technologies & citizen engagement:
Strategies and capacity building for knowledge management:
e-Democracy
by
Rowena G. Bethel, Legal Advisor
Ministry of Finance, Government of The Bahamas
13-14 May 2010
Meeting organized by the United Nations Department of Economic
and Social Affairs (UNDESA) in cooperation with the International
Telecommunication Union (ITU)
Geneva, Switzerland
Citizen Engagement
• “the process of involving citizens in the
development of public policy in a way that
affords interactive and iterative deliberations
among citizens and their government”;
• citizens move from being mere spectators to
being actors.
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Important prerequisites
• Make information available regarding public
administration, its processes and policies;
• Provide meaningful avenues and opportunities
to engage with the public ‘channels of
communication’;
• Maintain an interactive and iterative dialogue as
matters progress through to their final outcomes.
• An e-government platform that has addressed
and implemented a back office knowledge
management framework to support online
information and services, applications and tools
to interactively engage with users.
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What about the plight of lower income
economies?
Challenges faced by lower income economies are
primary barriers to the levels of empowerment
desirable to improve the status of these countries
and their citizenry and ensure that “the
requirements needed to serve the collective
interest in the 21st century are met, i.e. an
effective public sector, an efficient private sector,
a dynamic civil society and an active citizenry.”*
* Presentation by Hon. Jocelyne Bourgon P.C., O.C. (Canada) to the OECD
public Governance Committee Symposium on “Open and inclusive policy
making held 16 October 2007 at OECD, Paris.
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Trends in e-government programmes to
advance citizen engagement
• E-democracy encompasses the harnessing of
online tools to facilitate and support participation
by the citizenry in public life and public
governance.
• Web 2.0 applications allow for information
sharing and peer-to-peer collaboration e.g blogs,
discussion fora, chatrooms, social networking
sites such as FaceBook, Twitter and Youtube
• Prolific use of the WWW for political
campaigning
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Engaging the youth in democracy
• In 2004, reported that 20% of youth in the US
rely on the Internet as their main source of
political campaign news.
• In 2009, the Obama Campaign in the US
successfully used multimedia tools to manage
the campaign, realising that in order to engage
the youth of the nation they had to utilise the
youths’ ways of communicating.
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UN e-government survey 2010 and e-participation
• E-participation is the area of online services that
opens up channels for online participation in
public affairs such as e-information,
e-consultation and e-decision making.
• E-participation remains in a nascent state in
many countries.
• E-participation is seen as a means of
“enhancing the effectiveness of Governments by
allowing them to respond to the needs of citizens
in a more direct manner”.
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