An Organizing Vision for E-Participation Projects in Africa

This chapter is concerned with exploring an alternative organizing vision for effective e-participation relevant to developing countries in Africa. The premise is that e-participation, as an e-government artifact, remains relatively poorly developed at the levels of theory and practice. The presentation adopts an explanatory critique by drawing on various perspectives; some of which are grounded on empirical results, while others are based on an analysis of literature. Under the alienating conditions of digital exclusion in Africa, the emergent e-government organizing vision is an evolving and technical artifact, with strong managerialist orientations of augmenting and reinforcing central governments control over its polity. Two consequences are highlighted: an evolution of public administration towards a technocracy, and increasing the efficiency of government bureaucracy through managerialization. This emerged concept reinforces digital exclusion, and thus hinders effective e-particpation. To address the shortcomings of this artifact concept, the chapter further presents literature and insights from prior analyses to underpin a nomadic e-particpation framework for realizing effective e-particpation. The framework is clustered around two major layers of building Mobile Communities: building local networks of governance and building flexible networks. The emphasis in the proposed framework is that the current conceptualization of e-government stifles e-particpation, which therefore limits greater online public participation and deliberations on public policy issues.