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This is the World Bank's blog on governance and anti-corruption. It aims at providing a space for debate and knowledge sharing on this critical field of development. | Learn more...

e-government

How can technology in public procurement bring about improved governance?

Submitted by Kashmira on Mon, 2009-05-04 18:36

-Jointly submitted by Kashmira Daruwalla and Tanya Gupta

Experts have identified procurement as one of the areas most prone to corruption in the public sector.  Corruption in public contracting can take many forms, including bribery, deception (fraud) or simple abuse, affects the efficiency of public spending and donors' resources and creates waste.  Corruption is widespread in public procurement and service delivery programs.  In a study in Uganda, Reinikka and Svensson compared central government data on public grants to schools from a survey of school officials to find what fraction of grants were ultimately received by schools.  They found that schools received only 13 percent of central government spending on the program, over the period 1991–1995.  Most schools received nothing and the evidence suggested that most of the funds leaked out of the public system through procurement fraud.

In a different randomized field experiment in Indonesia, Olken found that 24% of the funds for a road project had been stolen, after comparing reported expenditure and actual expenditure. 

e-democracies: will Digg-like social networks pave the way for participatory decision-making?

Submitted by Alfredo on Fri, 2009-04-24 18:16

The hype about social networking sites doesn't seem to come to an end.  If it's not Facebook, it's MySpace, and now it's Twitter.  Even though some people are still reluctant to believe in the functionality of some of these web 2.0 applications, it's a matter of years before they become a tool that we have to use on a daily basis, as it happened with email and the internet not so many years ago. 

In this entry, I will follow-up on one of Tanya's three points mentioned in her last entry -namely, participation-, and will make the case for Digg, one of some applications for social bookmarking that allow its users to share, comment and vote on their preferred bookmarks.  From my perspective, these participatory features can give us a glimpse of how decision making processes in the public sector might look like in the not-very-remote future.

E-Government: moving beyond services

Submitted by Tanya on Wed, 2009-04-22 17:56

A recent exchange between the members of the W3C group on e-government and the content of the last GSA’s newsletter on Transparency and Open Government, coordinated by Lisa Nelson, got me thinking about how narrowly we often conceive the scope of e-government, and in the process ignore important aspects of governance. 

To most people, e-government is all about better and improved services flowing from the government to the citizen (G2C).  Improvements in service provision usually imply more efficiency in the delivery and services of better quality.  However, the conversion of manual processes to automated processes -which is how most G2C implementation is done- discourages us from using new technologies able to change the paradigm of the relationship between citizens and their government.

Emerging e-government themes in the Obama administration

Submitted by Tanya on Mon, 2008-11-17 18:07

"Let us be the generation that reshapes our economy to compete in the digital age. Let's set high standards for our schools and give them the resources they need to succeed. Let's recruit a new army of teachers, and give them better pay and more support in exchange for more accountability.

Putting Governance before the “E” in E-Government

Submitted by Tanya on Fri, 2008-11-07 14:17

Taking e-government beyond the same tired e-government applications require innovations such as social networking, web 2.0/3.0 and mobile technology, all of which are democratizing the web in different ways.  The basics of e-government are in the process of moving from a top-down model (e-government strategy, vision, principles, down to agencies, businesses and citizens) to a bottom-up paradigm (citizen-level application managed and developed at the lowest level) with the citizen being the engine of the new e-government. 

When did e-government become stagnant?  Well, not so long ago it wasn’t stagnant.  The anticipation and optimism behind e-government when it first entered the international consciousness was immense, a prodigious vision of sorts.  Led in the US by the Clinton-Gore administration and pursued by other administrations in developed and developing countries alike, e-government became a mantra, a fix-all for the various problems in the public sector.  As e-government implementation matured, the potential for significant failure became clearer. Yet, when successful, e-government projects could make a real difference.  For instance, e-government -a significant part of Singapore’s “Vision of an Intelligent Island” with respect to public services-, helped to improve public sector performance and governance in a manner that positively impacted the daily lives of its citizens.