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When developing a management approach for eEngagement, one of the most common barriers faced by public sector managers in New Zealand and Australia is the wide array of competing, contested and conflicting definitions employed to describe it.
Even an increasingly common term like ‘electronic democracy’ evokes an array of responses, from highly specific definitions (such as voting over the internet) to nebulous concepts (an information environment which is open, participative and free to access). These terms can be loaded and be a vehicle for a variety of implicit assumptions and norms, particularly around issues of direct democracy.
Exhibit 6: Direct Democracy – Definition
A form of democratic government whereby citizens have the right to participate in decision-making through referenda on legislative initiatives. Direct democracy can exist in parallel to representative democracy, for example, where ballot initiatives allow citizens to vote on legislative initiatives, or replace representative democracy. In practice, direct democracy is limited by the complexity of modern policy making and the capacity for citizens to deliberate issues in a timely and expedient manner.
Scrutiny of Acts and Regulations Committee, Parliament of Victoria, 2005
This emerging area of practice and study has generated a range of competing terms because the technology and its impact on political processes is so new. It may be many years, if ever, before scholarship and practice moves towards agreement on terminology. In addition, the complex and often ill defined nature of policy-making processes, combined with the highly dynamic nature of information technology, work against the establishment of a clear, unambiguous definition for eEngagement.
While this proliferation of terminology is confusing and sometimes only reflects the predilection of individual authors, some terms are carefully chosen and have distinct meanings based within a specific area of literature or practice. Readers need to take care when a term is deliberately employed because it may have a very specific meaning. A good example would be the differing use of the terms ‘eDemocracy’ and ‘eGovernance'. The former commonly refers to a broader notion of equal participation throughout the political system,[1] while the latter can refer to an organisational or inter-organisational focus.[2]
Similarly, some authors use different terms in a nested, or typological, manner. Two examples would include:
- the use of ‘eGovernment’ to refer to the overarching application of information and communications technologies by government and ‘eDemocracy’ as those uses in government with a specific political focus; versus
- the use of ‘eGovernment’ to specifically refer to electronic and online service delivery and ‘eDemocracy / eGovernance’ to refer to policy-making processes utilising new technology.
Exhibit 7: The Confusing Terminology of eEngagement
Each of the following prefixes and suffixes has been used at one time or another to describe this area of practice (the list is not exclusive)
Prefix
Suffix
Electronic (e-)
Government
Online
Democracy
Digital
Governance
i- (as in information)
Engagement
Cyber
Commons
Virtual
Participation
Tele
Agora
Mobile (m-)
Rule Making
While there is value in separating the ‘political’ and ‘technical’ elements of public management, the investment in public sector infrastructure, electronic democracy initiatives and electronic service delivery are at once separate and complementary, activities.
This separation results from a number of factors, trends and contradictions:
- there is often an explicit desire on the part of democratic theorists to separate service functions from democratic functions, due to a conceptual and philosophical delineation between notions of inherent political rights and the reciprocal and/or conditional relationships commonly implied in service provision;
- democratic participation has an emphasis on universalism (such as equal participation for all), whereas in developed nations there is an increasing emphasis on selective service delivery;
- there is often a managerial desire to maintain a separation of policy development from service functions, either due to the logic of purchaser-provider splits, or to separate payment functions from policy access;
- much of the overarching information technology infrastructure (the technological level) associated with electronic and online service delivery is of equal value in facilitating electronic participation and democracy: for example, encryption standards can be employed for eProcurement or for online voting (the application level); and
- the development and implementation of electronic and online service delivery systems is commonly undertaken by business process or customer service units, rather than policy development units.
A more useful way of conceptualising the relationship between the development of an electronically-facilitated democracy and the role of public sector managers as Moore’s responsive entrepreneurs is presented in Figure 1. This figure associates different types of engagement activities with different management roles or ‘approaches’ to project implementation, based on two axes of classification:
- the Nature of the Programmatic approach: representing the expected role of government in programs which result from the engagement process (the degree to which project outcomes will be ‘top down’ or ‘bottom up’); and
- the Specificity of Outcome (Intention) : representing the degree to which eventual outcomes will be highly focused (with simple / singular performance criteria) or more diffuse in their objectives (resulting in more complex / perceptual performance reporting).
