Transparency and E-Government in Developing Countries: The Case of Latin-American Municipalities

Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) have become an important tool to be used in order to meet NPM objectives in public administrations, by enhancing information flows and active participation by citizens, constituting a valuable tool for building trust and enhancing government-citizen relations, by identifying, assessing and, thus, satisfying public needs. This chapter focuses on the Internet, one of the tools that is most widely used by the public, and on on-line access to government financial information (Borins, 2002). Concretely, this chapter examines and discusses the approach taken by local governments in developing countries to using the Web as a means of making government disclosures, thus combating corruption and enhancing accountability by means of information transparency. To achieve this aim, a series of aspects to provide an overview of the degree of on-line information and the accessibility of this information in Latin-American capital cities are analyzed. This way, this chapter discusses the e-government process and its implications on democracy, accountability and information transparency and describes the state of the art of e-government initiatives and legislation in the sample governments. The results obtained and the main conclusions of the research indicate that Latin-American capital cities are still not fully aware of the potential importance of the Internet in enabling the achievement of e-democracy initiatives. Indeed, the Internet is still not an important means by which sample governments disclose their local government information to the public. DOI: 10.4018/978-1-61520-931-6.ch009