EU eGovernment funded research: filling holes in the state of the art

Electronic governance, or the facilitation of governance through ICT and related tools, provides a unique opportunity for reassessment of the traditional methods, processes, and outputs of the public sector. This paper addresses some of these key opportunities and the challenges that accompany them. The overall aim of the paper is to show that there are some critical holes that have been created by the evolution of contemporary e-government discourse at both the policy and academic level.
Practically and concretely, this paper intends to highlight and address the challenges of developing an understanding of change in governance structures that recognise the need to improve participatory methods in policy making whilst also assuring that exclusion - of a digital nature or otherwise - does not render the process counter-productive. It raises questions of representativeness, meaningfulness, the role of existing institutional elements in current governmental structures, and the question of political will for moving towards a model of governance that makes use of ICT-based means.
The structure of the paper is as follows: first, I address the results and implications of the electronic government debate and outline the challenges that still remain, highlighting the need for a multi-disciplinary approach to dealing with these issues: I particularly highlight the importance of the contribution of the social sciences to the discussion. This will include a stock-taking exercise in the domain of e-government, which builds upon exiting literature in the field, notably the UN Global E-government Readiness Reports as well as thinking towards future research agendas for e-governance, which shall enable us, in Part 3, to move on to discuss innovations in governance, through an analysis of the concept in a liberal democratic context. The fourth part of the paper will address new tools and applications and how they can encourage change in public sector governance. Finally, the paper will provide a summary of the opportunities and the challenges for governments and public administrations, and provide a possible framework for developing an approach to these.