For developing countries e-governance and the effective use of ICTs offer an avenue to ‘leapfrog’ slow economic development and to improve the endemically faulty and constantly repaired machinery of dysfunctional government. Effective deployment of ICT can lead to a radical reconfiguration of the hierarchical and centralised forms of administrative and social organisational structure, as well as expedite decentralised and interactive forms of communication based on networked relationships between government, business, citizens and civil society. These new forms of relationships comprise an ‘e-governance architecture’; however, such a transformation requires a fully committed and functional government. Few developing countries have adopted a governance design approach as their priority. Most first attempt to implement ICT programs, then construct a governance framework. Poorly designed e-governance architecture (the composite of networked relationships between government, business, citizens and civil society), inadequate implementation and program failure, however, can prove catastrophic, because developing countries have neither time nor resources to expend on failure.
This article examines Bangladesh as an exemplar of an institutionally weak state that requires radical reform initiatives. It explains how lack of transparency, symbiosis of the political and administrative structure, endemic corruption and ‘integrated clientelism’ create obstacles to e-governance led reform. Finally, the paper proposes an ICT governance framework and identifies issues that need to be addressed for its operationalization.
For developing countries, the promise of ICTs includes a ‘leapfrog’ effect to bypass time-consuming, resource-intensive phases of growth, which also incur an opportunity cost. Experience suggests that incremental, evolutionary change is more the reality than revolutionary shifts and sudden resolutions: why are conditions in developing countries likely to prove so different that the gap experienced in developed countries between promise and delivery will not occur Certainly construction of enduring systems of governance and the development of an attitudinal shift that comes to regard the new regime as second nature may take longer than providing the technical means of data management and communication. The understandable desire to leapfrog is in tension with the risks introduced, which may be better moderated by incremental change. Evidence is emerging that technologies that depend on infrastructure are far less likely to achieve the swift embrace demanded of them
E-governance
E-governance shifts the focus from government as the principal actor, beneficiary and controller, through a useful but centralizing whole-of-government model, to greater engagement across the board, in a whole-of-community model, because it shifts primary attention from process alone to an integrated processing and the communication technologies that incorporates people, processes, information, and technology in the service of achieving governance objectives because it draws us away from a single focus on technical achievement towards the gains that users hope to achieve from that technology. It is thus primarily “transformational” rather than only an incremental improvement in design and delivery of traditional systems New paradigms of management require an integrated and networked governance structure which an e-governance architecture can facilitate by drawing on the capacity of ICT for communication and responsiveness. The main objectives of e-government have been to restructure administrative functions and processes, overcome barriers to coordination and cooperation in public administration, monitor government performance, and improve the relationship between government and other stakeholders. A governance infrastructure is thus paramount for achieving administrative efficiency and procedural simplicity. The large claim for e-governance is that it can offer a leapfrog approach by promoting swifter changes in the way in which a country is governed. E-governance may then be able to facilitate decentralised networks for administrative activities, breaking down traditional centralising patterns It may also create conditions in structures and processes that make the system transparent, participatory, multilayered and accountable through loosening central controls on information.
Conversely, failure to adopt new technologies and solutions threatens development in the kind of world and commercial enterprise that embraces ICTs: developing countries may have no choice but to do business in the way that influential partners require.. Importantly, where some traditional infrastructure is lacking, business may be encouraged to migrate from place, the geographical centre of an industry, to space, the virtual realm of services and negotiation..
Current Issues in Bangladesh
Bangladesh, as a nation with explicit government attention to and published policy about ICTs, is in many respects well positioned to shift fundamentally into the Information Age on a broad scale There are signals of willingness to take up e-initiatives and explicit commitments to implementation:
This Policy aims at building an ICT-driven nation comprising of knowledge-based society by the year 2006. In view of this, a country-wide ICT-infrastructure will be developed to ensure access to information by every citizen to facilitate empowerment of people and enhance democratic values and norms for sustainable economic development by using the infrastructure for human resources development, governance, e-commerce, banking, public utility services and all sorts of on-line ICT-enabled services. (BCC, 2002: 2.1 Vision)Bangladesh’s e-government strategy (http://www.mosict.gov.bd/ict_policy.htm) is aimed at introducing new technologies to facilitate inter- and intra-agency communication and cooperation, and consequently to provide information and services to its citizens more effectively. Facilitating good governance is an explicit objective (s.2.2.4). E-government/e-governance receives its own section (3.6). The undifferentiated pairing of the two means that emphasis is on delivery and access mechanisms.
Bangladesh government initiatives
Professor Jamilur Reza Choudhury has pointed out at a conference in Melbourne that developing countries will take a long lead-time to deploy ICTs as tools and using them as facilitators for governance improvement. Even where governance has emerged as a focus, the emphasis has often been on straightforward improvements in transparency through wider, faster access – that is, using ICT’s most obvious and basic functions. This is a passive kind of transparency, because it does not incorporate active responses and ongoing improvement. Because just such problems of transparency and access are fundamental to governance in Bangladesh, ICT offers at least a starting point. Yet against responding to even this opportunity, there is the remarkably low numbers of computers, notwithstanding incentives to purchase them. Similarly, enlarging opportunities for global linkages still encounters problems of comparative affordability for users . Dial-up access is limited not only technically but because of low teledensity, for which mobile phones cannot easily or cheaply substitute.
The Bangladesh Government’s IT policy (1999-2002; BCC, 2002) is unexceptionable in its aims, but it relies both on machine and user capacity, and implementation has therefore been weak . T here appears to be a ‘vicious cycle’ in the policy, for example where preference in employment is to be given to those who are IT-literate , but such literacy will – and can – only follow from access, training and constant review of capacity. Policy design is thus only weakly and rhetorically linked to resource capacity. The Government of Bangladesh appears to have recognised this deficiency and is embarking on a process designed to identify and respond to the training needs of the all levels of government.
In governance, there are opportunities for initiatives in communications between government and business and citizens, in security surveillance and consultation with the public over legislation, between governments at large, and within government itself. In service provision, examples include land records and transactions, government procurement, health records and advice, utility payments, postal services, taxation, recruitment, redress of grievances, . The web portal has been slow to achieve broad use and has fallen foul of embedded controls on information release . Law has not yet moved to accommodate cyber transactions fully but also securely . In these can be seen traditional bureaucratic caution, first, in resisting information release as a diminution of power, and, second, in according unfamiliar legal initiatives lower priority. These are shortcomings for implementing effective e-governance.
In each case, the detailed aims of the Bangladesh Computer Council remain poorly implemented or unmet. At least some of these, such as the enactment of legislative controls on intellectual property rights and security, are within the province of the executive and the legislature, and are not resource-intensive technological requirements at all: failure here is one of political will, it appears.
Bangladesh experience reveals a disconnection between high-level policy development and lower-level engagement and commitment, and between broad infrastructure capacity and field-level operations. The importance of recognition of central management of e-governance as a key to coordinating improvements and embedding ICTs as part of a new culture of operations can not be denied. Training facilities are a revealing example: the number and quality of the facilities is prima facie very good – until we compare them with the scale of training actually required for the civil service, the dispersed nature of that service, and the likelihood of training having a day-to-day contribution in the field, or even in some ministries.
e-Readiness
The United Nations has signalled the importance of addressing e-readiness and capacity in Bangladesh specifically (UN, 2004): Bangladesh’s e-government readiness ranking is very low (e.g., UN, 2003b, c), above only a few smaller or disadvantaged states; low in linear development in portal and service provision (UN, 2004); in the lowest scoring group for delivery stages and utilization including within the South-central Asia grouping (UN, 2004; 2003c). The World Economic Forum ranked Bangladesh’s networked readiness at 118 out of 122 countries (WEF, 2008). In readiness components, Bangladesh typically scores at very low levels except in government readiness, where it is only about three-quarters of the way down the list (WEF, Global Information Technology Reports).
In Bangladesh, human resource issues suffer from governance failure, with patronage rife in recruitment in the public sector, despite high-level policy commitment to reform .This can easily overtake an emphasis on specific skill requirements such as ICT experience at the time of recruitment. .
The record of achievement and interest is very uneven. Specific technologies, such as mobile telephones, have experienced startling take-up, while older but essential infrastructure, such as landlines, and parallel new substitutes, such as satellites, remain deficient (Yunus, 2000; Accascina, 2001; Kingham, 2003; Sobhan et al., 2002; ADB, 2005; GSMA, 2005; Economist, 2005).
Success in e-governance requires more than just deployment of technology and building connectivity. It requires much broader and far-reaching readiness in terms of policy initiatives, infrastructure building and skill development, most of which are not technological in nature. [emphasis added]
This is precisely where Bangladesh has not proved effective: where good governance generally is at a premium, this begs important questions about capacity to develop effective e-governance in the first place. The social consequences may prove ongoing and expanding. In the absence of adequate readiness a gap emerges between those who have the technical skills and those who do not. This digital divide creates a super-elite class within the already structured, classified and hierarchical administrative and political structure. In Bangladesh, the lack of computers and Internet sites means that the important stakeholders have only limited access and use. This digital divide is limiting cultural and regional diversity on the Internet.
In an earlier study we have found that significant shortfalls in capacity. Only about a third of Secretariat officers had direct access to a personal machine, and this was skewed towards the higher levels. Although the other access arrangements raised total access to nearly three-quarters , it can be inferred that absence of a personal machine will inhibit work on and familiarity with ICT, thus reinforcing traditional ‘analogue’ bureaucratic work – pen, paper and files. Internal and external connectivity were variable, with a strong reliance on dial-up, but a strong response to email availability is counter to actual machine access (and contradicted by other survey data). Technical support was very low and inconsistent in expertise.
Not surprisingly, real use of computers at work was low, with an emphasis on word processing; technical capacity of machines was underutilised. Trained personnel were very unevenly distributed, but generally the level was low, and nominated skills beyond basic levels were also low. For e-governance itself, awareness was positive overall but perception is skewed to the higher levels, which again accords with direct access both to machines and to explicit policy discussion.
Such findings show a troublesome combination of understanding of real need coupled with promotion of achievements to date and an apparent willingness to overlook or downplay the consequences for meeting policy directions. T here is a disconnection between statistical reporting of technical capacity, inferences about probable use of computers irrespective of actual numbers and ratios per person in the civil service, and very little awareness of how this inherent incapacity must contribute to resistance to change in work practices, whether implicitly (lack of machine access) or explicitly (frustration at limited access; adherence, instead, to old practices). Under such conditions, pursuit of digital Bangladesh can look utopian.
Challenges
1. The common confusion between ICT capacity for delivery and the use of ICT at a deeper, more meaningful level to change patterns of work and responsiveness.
2. Priority to governance planning before implementation pressures overwhelm attention to governance. This is much harder, because it seems to require deferring urgent implementation, as well as running against the obvious ‘out of the box’ capacity that modern desktop computers offer as a key feature.
3. An e-governance architecture is required to create the structural and functional readiness within Bangladesh now, and is this demonstrated through Government commitment?
4. More difficult at first sight, government-mandated use of Bangla has still to be accommodated technically.
6. Inadequate technical and policy capacity is a fundamental barrier to digital Bangladesh.. In Bangladesh, the lack of technical capacity and public managers’ perceptions of ICT is problematic in regard to issues such as migration to IP-based networks, implementation of mobile communication systems, and e-commerce applications, though capacity building measures do exist. One of the chief obstacles to effective e-governance is a lack of awareness about the usefulness of the Internet in policy making, coordination of policy implementation, creating portals in engaging important actors in the policy process, and in building an open and transparent public platform for wider participation.
7. Recognising the differing interests among stakeholders and developing a simple and manageable e-governance infrastructure is a key challenge. The Government of Bangladesh must evaluate how strategic e-governance plans are developed, communicated and integrated into the existing structure of public administration. It is also important to identify the changes needed in structure, processes and people.
Within Bangladesh, the greatest challenge at present is the reconstruction or creation of institutions that will enable good governance of the whole society, such as the restitution of Parliamentary democracy, independence of the judiciary, appropriate separation of powers and remedying endemic corruption on large and small scales in the relationships between the governing and the governed.
8. More fundamentally, current political circumstances in Bangladesh are at odds with the goals of the official IT policy. A policy focus on governance, however, may helpfully resolve these contradictions, changing the management paradigm for the public sector and for its theoreticians .Indeed, the command and control approach of traditional public services is not necessarily incompatible with a governance approach .For Bangladesh the challenge will also include extending central and major regional governance down to the village level, positively disrupting traditional practices of patronage.
Conclusion
Operationalizing e-governance will come down not to an assertion of leadership through ever more comprehensively designed policy, because that has been done very well, but by demonstrating that government and its governance arrangements can be made strong enough to lead such a disruptive intervention with its own practices and its citizens’ expectations; that is, “the chief challenge for government is not the implementation of new technologies; it is organizational change required to develop more productive information flows” ..
In two crucial respects, the Government of Bangladesh is in a good position to benefit from ICT-related governance reforms.
First is in the level of awareness of its senior public sector management and awareness both of the importance of policy development and leadership . The principal obstacles to building on this foundation can be met, but only at considerable additional commitment and therefore cost. These are in technical capacity, resource allocation and, most challengingly of all, in reform and strengthening of national institutions. The last, for example, underpin the role of the law and the behaviour of the legislature and judiciary. The second, almost paradoxically, lies in Bangladesh’s attachment to hierarchical management. Although over time e-mediated relationships can – and probably should – weaken and recast this attachment, in the short term it offers central planners the opportunity to build a phased implementation of ICT across the society and to use their considerable authority to enforce its direct use, at least by its own officers.
In one of the clichés of management reform, the Government of Bangladesh has shown clearly that it is prepared to ‘talk the talk’; now it must ‘walk the walk’. In this it should be assisted to draw on the experiences of other jurisdictions and commentators, recognizing that creation of an effective e-governance architecture is a desirable goal for all users of ICTs, and yet to be wholly achieved anywhere. Lessons from Bangladesh’s experience are therefore likely to encourage reflection and improvement elsewhere.
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