e-democracy

With the rapid spread of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), new opportunities have been opened for a revival of public discourse and improved governance efficiency. ICTs offer concrete opportunities for local and national governments to improve their performance in terms of transparency, participation and decentralization. The mainstreaming of ICTs within planning and design of development strategies helps to strengthen the establishment of efficient, effective and transparent governance systems. This paper takes a critical look at Democracy and Governance.

This Report present the World Bank's ICT Strategy for the period 2012-2015. The Strategy for 2012-2015 will emphasize the transformative potential of information and communication technologies while focusing on innovation and infrastructure. The new ICT strategy will be comprised by three pillars. It will promote ICTs to transform services for greater development impact—strengthening accountability and governance, improving public services, and enabling more inclusive private delivery of services (Transform pillar).

In the developing countries, the technical and non-technical infrastructures are not as mature as those of developed countries. Requirements for local e-government also differ from those at the national level due to differences in technical, social and political factors, necessitating customized local e-government implementation models. In developing countries, local e-government implementation is also constrained by lack of information about its requirements, with the possible risk of duplication of national experiences and knowledge.

Communications technology has enabled new approaches to governance in which stakeholders across sectors and jurisdictions are engaged in consensus building and implementation processes. This paper explores some mechanisms through which online social networking may impact governance for sustainable development. Are social networking sites driving the transformation of the governance landscape or are they merely diverting vast amounts of time from addressing the difficult sustainable development challenges at hand?

This article explores the challenges of fighting corruption and presents some ideas on how to start addressing them through the use of ICT. Section 1 sets the scene by providing a brief overview of how pervasive, serious and difficult to fix the problem of corruption is. Section 2 gives a sense of the very exuberant hopes and expectations that ride on new information and communication technologies to evolve into a game-changer in the fight against corruption.