How Can Digital Technologies Improve Public Services and Governance?

Nagy K. Hanna

• Publisher: Business Expert Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781631578144
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Service Industry
• Index: Business

This book considers the opportunities and challenges of harnessing digital technologies for improved public services and governance. It focuses on the challenges of applying digital technologies in developing countries, where dramatic results can be realized. It addresses questions like these: How can digital technologies help enhance transparency, accountability, and participation to improve service design and delivery? Where are the opportunities to enhance key areas of governance and public service delivery? What are the promising practices to strengthen supply and mobilize demand for good governance and service delivery? What are the emerging lessons from recent experience? The author explains with real cases how ICT can be deployed to improve public sector efficiency and accountability for resource management; improve access and quality of public services for citizens; enhance transparency and reduce costs of government-business transactions, support entrepreneurship, attract private investment, and reduce the burden of regulation; and enhance the effectiveness of political oversight and policy institutions. This book details the importance of understanding the social, political, and institutional contexts and the policies that might scale up ICT for governance and public service improvement.

CHAPTER 1

Opportunities and Challenges Overview

All over the world, citizens are demanding more openness, transparency, and accountability for public services, and this demand has been heightened since the 2008 global financial crisis, the Arab Spring Uprisings of 2011, and growing economic insecurity in many developed and developing countries. Citizens are becoming increasingly vocal in their dissatisfaction with corruption, rising inequality, poor service delivery, and public policy formulation and execution. They are seeking to monitor public sector performance, services, budgets, and programs, challenging government performance, and influencing policy decisions, through the new social media, and mobile apps, among others. Progressive policy makers and service providers are also seeking client feedback and coinnovation and cocreation of services. Development thinkers and practitioners have increasingly acknowledged the centrality of governance and improved public services to accelerated and sustainable development (Acemoglu and Robinson 2012; World Bank 2003 and 2017). While demand for good governance is emerging as a priority in the international development community, much still needs to be done to ensure its adaptation to the context of developing countries and poor communities.

In the meantime, a number of new digital technologies (information and communication technologies, or ICTs) are sweeping the planet—inducing power shifts and posing profound implications and opportunities for transparency, governance, and accountability to citizens (social accountability), and for continuous service improvement and innovation. Mobile phones have diffused rapidly in poor and rich countries alike, and now offer high access and mobility, and a ubiquitous platform for easy-to-develop applications for networking, collecting data, monitoring projects, and reporting misdeeds. Crowdsourcing technology is enabling collaboration in real time and on a massive scale, including service innovation. Geo-mapping technologies, big data, and analytics can now help governments, citizens, and social intermediaries to overlay socioeconomic information with geospatial data—pinpointing the distribution of projects and their impact, enabling active citizen participation in solving local problems, and so on. Advances in databases, broadband, cloud computing, and open data platforms are enabling data sharing and opening up massive government data stores to citizens and businesses—with major implications for open government, and coproduction and collaborative innovation of services. The open government data initiative that the United States pioneered a few years ago is being adapted and replicated in many advanced as well as developing countries.

The book considers the opportunities and challenges of harnessing digital technologies for improved public services and governance. It focuses on the challenges of applying digital technologies in developing countries, particularly in Africa, where dramatic results can be realized. It focuses on ways to improve services beyond supply-side measures such as business-process-engineering and improved management of service providers. Thus, it focuses on strengthening the demand for good governance and improved services via informed citizens, client feedback, and enhanced monitoring of service provider performance. It addresses questions like these: How can digital technologies help enhance transparency, accountability, and participation to improve service design and delivery? What are the broad ICT application opportunities to enhance key areas of governance and public service delivery? What practices have been seen to strengthen supply and mobilize demand for good governance? How could policy reform and other complementary investments in technology, institutions, and capabilities at the national and local levels have maximum impact on ICT for service delivery? What are the promises and limits of digital technologies for service delivery? What are the emerging lessons from recent experience? What are the promising areas for future action, experimentation, and research? And what are the risks to privacy and security arising from increased access to information about citizens?

Opportunities for Governance and Innovation in Public Servcies

Digital technologies allow citizens to adopt new strategies to communicate, coordinate, mobilize, and have their voices heard. Digital networks have acted as a massive supply shock to the spread and cost of information, including information on government programs and performance. They also made it possible for citizens to make their voices heard, by increasing their reach and access to media. In the process, they magnify the speed and scale of group coordination and help synchronize the behavior of groups quickly, cheaply, and publicly in ways that were unavailable as recently as a decade ago. ICT can empower citizens and businesses to access, coproduce, and utilize information to hold public agencies accountable for enforcing laws and delivering public services, and to participate meaningfully in managing development. Trends in connectivity, mobile phones, and ICT platforms suggest that ICT will increasingly become a transformative tool for governance, by making government processes transparent and information accessible to all stakeholders. Digital technologies offer powerful tools and platforms for addressing development challenges in general, and public sector performance and governance in particular (Chapter 2). They both require and offer the opportunity to rethink the process by which the state and nonstate actors interact to design and implement policies and public services.

The book shows through many examples how ICT can be deployed to improve public sector efficiency and accountability for resource management by: modernizing public expenditure management systems, making them transparent, and tracking budgets online and through mobile devices (Chapter 3). Digital technologies can help make public services more inclusive by mapping and monitoring the needs and resources of poor communities with mobile and digital mapping technologies. E-government procurement can open up public procurement systems for fair competition and accountability by using electronic procurement applications and engaging social intermediaries. Integrated financial management systems can modernize tax systems and revenue administration to raise revenues while reducing corruption, tax avoidance, and misallocation of expenditures. Human resources management systems can improve public service performance by using incentives tied to clear and measurable performance indicators and service outcomes.

ICT can be applied to improve the supply of each public service or function and at the same time strengthen transparency, accountability, and demand for continuous improvement and good governance. Optimally used, ICT can modernize and reengineer government processes (to make resource management more efficient and responsive, for example), and at the same time render them transparent, enable oversight, and strengthen social accountability. In the area of corruption, a key is to make information more readily available; for instance, by putting corruption-prone activities online and making them monitorable and searchable.

A second broad area of ICT-enabled governance is services to citizens (Chapter 3). Improving public service access and quality is a political, social, and economic imperative for all developing countries, and particularly for many African countries that have persistently low human development indicators. The UN consensus on Sustainable Development Goals sets even more ambitious targets for eradicating poverty and shared prosperity by 2030. A key route to improve the availability, quality and responsiveness of public services is to augment citizen monitoring and feedback. This is perhaps the most fertile area for using ICT to strengthen accountability via citizens and social intermediaries, using mobile, e-government, and open data. The book surveys applications in Africa, ranging from the supply of water, land titles, licenses, permits, and certificates via citizen-centric portals and community access centers, to the delivery and monitoring of health and education services, to providing choice and competition in service delivery through information brokerage and the use of public–private partnerships (PPPs).

A third area is to enhance transparency and reduce costs of government—business transactions, support entrepreneurship and small enterprise development, attract private investment, facilitate trade, and reduce the burden of regulation. This is a crucial area for the future of developing countries with its potential for employment generation, competitiveness, and broad-based growth. Relevant transactions and services cover customs, public procurement, online business registration and permits, access to land records, municipal services to business, financial services (including mobile-based transactions), monitoring of agricultural and other extension services, and monitoring government enforcement of regulation. Although there are promising grassroots innovations in this area, they lag behind ICT use for government accountability to provide services to citizens. This is perhaps due to conflicting interests and weak partnerships among business intermediaries, development partners, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs).

One final broad area in which ICT can improve governance is to enhance the effectiveness and accountability of political, oversight, and policy institutions; enforce the rule of law; and modernize the legislative and judicial branches of government (Chapter 3). For example, ICT can improve parliamentary processes in many ways—improving transparency and openness; providing information access to citizens; improving the mechanisms of accountability of legislators to their electorates; enabling dialogue between the parliament, its members, and the citizenry; and helping citizens keep an eye on parliament. Other examples include monitoring elections and crowdsourcing data from citizens on violence, human rights abuses, and crisis situations, and enhancing the capacity and transparency of policy-making and oversight institutions.

The impact of digital technology on citizen empowerment and government (and provider) capability depends on the initial strengths of government institutions. Digital technology, aligned with incentives of politicians, public administrators, and service providers can be highly effective in improving services. But patronage-based bureaucracies can resist change and e-government advance. These institutional constraints can persist, and cannot be ignored. Sustained collective action is often necessary to address service delivery failures (Chapter 4).

The dividends of digital technology depend on initial institutional conditions and vary by service (World Bank 2016). For services that are easy to monitor and based on routine tasks, digital technologies can improve outcome rapidly, even when institutions are weak, as with cash transfer and licensing. But for services that are hard to monitor and require more discretion from workers, the quality of institutions is more important. In such cases, technology only augments the initial institutional conditions and capabilities, as with teaching, and health services.

A Paradigm Shift in Governance and Public Service

The new ICT tools and platforms are facilitating a power shift in the way citizens engage with the state. The pace of this shift may be uncertain, and perhaps exaggerated for the short term, but the long-term impact is likely to be profound. The rise of social media, the growing number and networking power of civil society organizations (CSOs), mutual learning and information sharing among CSOs, the demographic changes of youth and urban population growth, government decentralization reforms, and open government initiatives and access to public information laws—all are contributing factors for this power shift. These factors are strengthening the demand for good governance and the capability of citizens to hold the state accountable. They are also contributing to the rise of “populism” in politics. ICT complements and reinforces those contributors to the power shift by removing gatekeepers and intermediaries, breaking the monopoly of the state and official channels on news, and helping local NGOs to network and organize. The high costs of ignoring real-time dialogue with citizens should increasingly become evident to governments.

One promising development in the use of ICT by NGOs and CSOs is the training and sharing it enables among NGOs across countries. Social media capacity building is on the rise. While mainstream media has been dominated by the state, it has ignored the youth on which social media focus. Developing countries may enjoy the next wave of democratization and access to information with the explosive growth of their use of mobile and social media.

The call of citizens for government accountability is a testament to the rise of public opinion. Will this reinforce the recent focus on accountability in international development? Since 2005, there have been several international declarations on accountability for aid effectiveness, and a shift from asking that governments in developing countries be accountable to donors to asking them to be directly accountable to their own citizens.¹ For a long time, international development has concentrated on the state, not the full range of institutions that deliver good governance. Are development partners willing to go beyond using accountability as a buzzword and to committing whatever it takes in time, resources, political capital, broader engagements, and appropriate organizational cultures?

Taking direct accountability seriously is not without challenges (Odugbemi and Lee 2011). Access to information and ICT is a critical, though not sufficient, condition to this paradigm shift. First, there is the skepticism of technocratic professionals who see accountability measures as political invasions of their comfort zones. Second, there is the tendency to rely on accountability tools—and particularly ICT tools—to do the work, without mobilizing the critical staff and social intermediaries as would be necessary to make the technical tools work. Third, the staff of development agencies face supply-driven incentives and short-time horizons that often get in the way of understanding the local context and the behavior of local stakeholders. Fourth, the tradition of governance reform (the logic of the discipline) has taken a state-centric view of governance, insulating decision-making from democratic control and accountability, and shifting power to technocratic guardians (Odugbemi and Lee 2011; Roberts 2010). This view neglects the roles of citizens (and their intermediaries) and the capacity of those citizens to hold their governments accountable for the governance agenda.

It is hoped that the many examples provided in this book can contribute to our understanding of how to integrate ICT into efforts to enhance the capacity of citizens to hold their governments accountable and to ease some of these challenges. It is also hoped that these examples raise awareness about how initial institutional conditions do shape the impact of digital technologies.

Public Services and Governance Challenges

There is a growing consensus in developing countries that better governance is a key element in promoting growth and inclusive development. Gains in governance across the political, social, and economic spheres have been frustratingly slow. They must be consolidated, sustained, and built upon. Remaining challenges range from strengthening people’s confidence in elections, to respect the rule of law, to improve the business environment, and improve accountability for delivery of public services. Corruption remains a major challenge, and it is not limited to government agencies—private sector and NGOs also share significant responsibility.

The global economic and financial environment put further stress on developing countries’ governments to deliver basic services, create jobs, ensure global competitiveness, mobilize investment resources, and rely less on external resources of finance for development. There has been marked improvement in economic performance in many developing economies, in Africa, Middle East, and Latin America since the 1990s. But this impressive growth has been driven by a global commodity boom, and has not been matched by structural transformation of the economy.

Such transformation will have to come through diversifying their economies, increasing their shares in global manufacturing, developing their human resources for global competitiveness, developing their infrastructures and logistics, and acquiring capabilities to master the new technologies. These structural transformations depend on improved economic and political governance, transparent and accountable public finance, efficient and responsive delivery of public services, effective and transparent partnership with the private sector, and enabling citizen feedback and participation beyond the electoral cycle. This transformation requires constructive relations between the state and nonstate (citizens, businesses, CSOs)—improving the business and regulatory environment, developing institutions to enforce contracts and property rights, strengthening corporate governance, opening up government data, partnering and engaging with civil society, and collaborating across government agencies to improve public sector governance and performance. In short, country’s ability to achieve sustained structural transformation will depend on the political commitment coordination, and cooperation to support capacity building for governance, improve public sector performance, and effect the policy reforms that will enable effective use of ...