Building a Foundation for Sustainable Electronic Governance - From Experience, To Lessons, to a Framework
Dr. Tomasz Janowski, UNU-IIST, Macao
Several years after the acceptance of Electronic Government by governments worldwide as part of their reform initiatives, there is a growing recognition that over-reliance on technology, insufficient collaboration in government, lack of emphasis on building human capacity and inadequate public consultation all limit possible benefits of such initiatives. As a result, the focus has been shifting from Electronic Government - technology-enabled improvements in government operations, to Electronic Governance - improvements in interactions between government, non-government and civil society stakeholders. Under the new focus, it is no longer acceptable to let technical or organizational issues drive Electronic Governance initiatives alone. Instead, a multi-disciplinary, multi-stakeholder and community-oriented approach is required.
In this seminar we will present a concrete case of a transition from Electronic Government to Electronic Governance. The case relies on the experience obtained from the e-Macao Program - a government-wide effort to build a foundation for Electronic Government in Macao through a well-coordinated framework of initiatives from readiness assessment, through software and human capacity development, to research and dissemination. The seminar will discuss the lessons learnt from the program and introduce a best practice framework to build a Foundation for Sustainable Electronic Governance. The framework follows a multi-disciplinary, multi-stakeholder and community-oriented approach, and is well-suited to overcome, by design or adaptation, the challenges typical of many developing countries.
In the end, we will explore the idea of a UNU-wide Program on Electronic Governance to join various groups within the UNU that could jointly contribute, within their capacity, interests and areas of expertise, to the global agenda of Good Governance through applied and policy-oriented research, human capacity building, and technology-enabled organizational change in the public sector.
About the speaker
Senior Research Fellow, UNU-IIST Head, Center for Electronic Governance at UNU-IIST
Date: 03 September 2007
Time: 12:00 - 13:00 CET
