59 research outputs found
Routledge Handbook of Public Policy in Africa
This Handbook provides an authoritative and foundational disciplinary overview of African Public Policy and a comprehensive examination of the practicalities of policy analysis, policymaking processes, implementation, and administration in Africa today. The book assembles a multidisciplinary team of distinguished and upcoming Africanist scholars, practitioners, researchers and policy experts working inside and outside Africa to analyse the historical and emerging policy issues in 21st-century Africa. While mostly attentive to comparative public policy in Africa, this book attempts to address some of the following pertinent questions: • How can public policy be understood and taught in Africa? • How does policymaking occur in unstable political contexts, or in states under pressure? • Has the democratisation of governing systems improved policy processes in Africa? • How have recent transformations, such as technological proliferation in Africa, impacted public policy processes? • What are the underlying challenges and potential policy paths for Africa going forward? The contributions examine an interplay of prevailing institutional, political, structural challenges and opportunities for policy effectiveness to discern striking commonalities and trajectories across different African states. This is a valuable resource for practitioners, politicians, researchers, university students, and academics interested in studying and understanding how African countries are governed
The Proceedings of the 23rd Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research (DGO2022) Intelligent Technologies, Governments and Citizens June 15-17, 2022
The 23rd Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research theme is “Intelligent Technologies, Governments and Citizens”. Data and computational algorithms make systems smarter, but should result in smarter government and citizens. Intelligence and smartness affect all kinds of public values - such as fairness, inclusion, equity, transparency, privacy, security, trust, etc., and is not well-understood. These technologies provide immense opportunities and should be used in the light of public values. Society and technology co-evolve and we are looking for new ways to balance between them. Specifically, the conference aims to advance research and practice in this field.
The keynotes, presentations, posters and workshops show that the conference theme is very well-chosen and more actual than ever. The challenges posed by new technology have underscored the need to grasp the potential. Digital government brings into focus the realization of public values to improve our society at all levels of government. The conference again shows the importance of the digital government society, which brings together scholars in this field. Dg.o 2022 is fully online and enables to connect to scholars and practitioners around the globe and facilitate global conversations and exchanges via the use of digital technologies. This conference is primarily a live conference for full engagement, keynotes, presentations of research papers, workshops, panels and posters and provides engaging exchange throughout the entire duration of the conference
Open government data: an institutional logics perspective
Many countries in the world recently initiated the Open Government Data (OGD) to achieve
transparency, accountability, value from the data and to transform public sector into smart
and open government. However, the (OGD) initiatives faces challenges that hinders the
initiatives to achieve the desired objectives, particularly in developing countries.
The information systems adoption literature indicates a lack of studies investigating OGD
adoption at an early stage from the national ecosystem perspective. This research
investigates the early stage of adoption of the national OGD. The study adopts the
institutional perspective to investigate the role of institutional logics and institutional pillars.
The research aims to answer the research question: How do the institutional logics affect the
emergence and adoption of the Open Government Data initiative in the public sector? This
study adopts the interpretive research methodology with data collected from a singleembedded case study that encompasses nine government organisations in Oman. It captures
the institutional logics qualitatively, by applying pattern inducting technique, that affects the
adoption of OGD in the public sector in a complex institutional environment.
The phenomena investigated reveals that the institutional pillars affect the institutional logics
in the institutional environment. It shows how the institutional logics and institutional pillars
interplay at the macro- and micro-level. It also shows that normative and cultural-cognitive
pillar have a prominent effect, whereas the regulative pillar has less-prominent effect. This
study captured one dominant and three competing logics that enable/hinder the OGD
initiative from achieving the desired objectives: Institutional Acceptance Logic (ACL),
Institutional Roles Logic (IRL), Ownership and Control Logic (OCL) and Institutional
Capabilities Logic (ICL). The findings show that dominant logic is complemented by three
co-existing subordinate institutional logics.
This research contributes to the IS literature and to the institutional theory and further
explains how the institutional logics and institutional pillars affect the adoption of the OGD
initiative. It outlines how institutional logics are shaped and reconciled in the complex
environment at the national level. It offers a holistic view from an ecosystems perspective
and explains how institutional logics interact in a heterogeneous institutional environment.
Given the tensions between the dominant and competing institutional logics, the adoption
progresses at a slower pace. These tensions exist between micro and macro levels, and
contribute negatively to the adoption of the OGD initiative. The study suggests that in order
to reconcile the competing logics, a combined collaborative initiative to be formed between
regulatory authorities at the national level. In addition, it offers a conceptual framework for
OGD adoption at an early stage, and assists the policymakers and practitioners by presenting
a holistic view from the institutional perspectives to attain the desired objectives
IV Міжнародний науковий конгрес "Society of Ambient Intelligence - 2021" (ISCSAI 2021). Кривий Ріг, Україна, 12-16 квітня 2021 року
IV Міжнародний науковий конгрес "Society of Ambient Intelligence - 2021" (ISCSAI 2021). Кривий Ріг, Україна, 12-16 квітня 2021 року - матеріали.IV International Scientific Congress “Society of Ambient Intelligence – 2021” (ISCSAI 2021). Kryvyi Rih, Ukraine, April 12-16, 2021 - proceedings
A framework for developing citizen-centric e-government applications in developing countries: The design-reality gap in Uganda
Philosophiae Doctor - PhDE-government should be at the heart of service delivery in developing countries if the life of citizens, especially the socially and economically marginalised, is to be improved. Often in developing contexts, citizens have been treated as recipients of such interventions, in a top-down approach from central governments, resulting in the non-use of such interventions. A situation of non-use of e-services results in wastage of the public fiscus. The extant literature points to a number of underlying causes of the problem. One such problem is the “Design-Reality Gap.
An analytical tale of the social media discursive enactment of networked everyday resistance during the #feesmustfall social movement in South Africa
Social media are a space for discussions, debates and deliberations about personality, culture, society, and actual experiences of social actors in South Africa. They offer an unexpected opportunity for the broader consideration and inclusion of community members’ voices in governance decision making and policy processes. They also offer opportunities to engage, mobilise and change people and society in impressive scale, speed and effect: They have mobilising and transformative powers emanating from their interaction with the impetus of the agency of community members seeking better conditions of living. The magnitude of the effects of these powers makes it imperative to have a better understanding of their workings. Social media have been used in numerous social movements as the medium of communication to mobilise, coordinate, and broadcast protests. However, social media were never a guarantee of success as most movements using them did not achieve significant results. Yet, governments in developed and developing countries tend to engage inadequately with social media supported movements. The research problem is that the contribution of social media to the transformation of the social practice of discourse, which causes SSA community members’ agential impetus (collective intentionality for action) to generate a discourse of resistance on social media during social movements, is not well understood. The main research question is: Why are South African community members using social media to enact online discursive resistance during social movements? The aim of the research is to explain, from a critical realism point of view, Sub-Saharan African community members’ emergent usage of social media during social movements, by providing a contextualised social history (a tale) of South African community members’ practice of online discursive enactment of resistance. The emergent usage of social media of concern is conceptualised as “discursive enactment of networked everyday resistance” within a dialectical space of interaction conceptualised as “space of autonomous resistance”; an instance of a communication space allowing for transformative negation to occur. The research follows Bhaskar’s Critical Realism as a philosophical paradigm. Critical Realism seeks to explain phenomena by retroducing (retrospective inference) causal explanations from empirically observable phenomena to the generative mechanisms which caused them. The research was designed as a qualitative, processual and retroductive inquiry based on the Morphogenetic/Morphostasis approach with two phases: an empirical research developing the case of South African community members’ emergent usage of social media during the #feesmustfall social movement, looking for demi-regularities in social media discourse; and a transcendental research reaching into the past to identified significant events, objects and entities which tendencies are responsible for the shape of observed discourse. In the first phase, a case study was developed from data collected on the social media platform Twitter™, documents, and in-depth interviews of South African community members. The data collected were analysed using qualitative content analysis (QCA) and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to unveil demi-regularities; moving from the observable individual strategic orientation of messages to discourses, thus to the tendencies of relational emergent properties of systemic magnitude which structure local discourses and are transformed by them. Then, the social mediainduced morphogenesis or transformation of South African community members’ discursive action was postulated in an analytical history of emergence (or analytical tale) of their usage of social media within a “space of autonomous resistance” during social movements. The findings of the research suggest that South African community members authored 3 discourses of resistance on Twitter™: #feesmustfall discourses of struggle, identity and oppression. They identified as “student qua black-child” stepping into the “Freedom fighter” role against the hegemonic post-apartheid condition curtailing their aspirations. It was found that social media socio-cultural embeddedness and under-design (Western European socio-cultural globalising underpinning features and functional features of the platforms) which interaction with the local socio-cultural mix (postapartheid socio-cultural tendencies for domination/power, spiral of silence, and legitimacy/identification) resulted in misfits and workarounds enhancing individual emotional conflict and aligning towards a socio-cultural opportunistic contingent complementarity integration in the deployment of discourse. That integration was actualised as a mediatization emergent property through asignification/signification of mainstream discourses of liberal democracy, colonial capitalism, national democratic revolution, free and decolonised education, black consciousness and Fallism. That mediatization through re-signification of the struggle for freedom created a communication “space of autonomous resistance” where networked freedom fighters enacted discursive everyday resistance against the hegemonic forces of students’ precariousness. The contribution of the research includes a realist model of social media discursive action (ReMDA); an explanation of South African community members’ deployment of discourse over social media during social movement and telling the tale of the transformation of discursive practices with the advent of social media in South Africa
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Artificial-intelligence-related drivers of civic engagement: social capital, trust and values, and the mediating role of knowledge sharing
This thesis was submitted for the award of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel University LondonPurpose: To assess the relationship between social capital and civic engagement in the absence
and presence of knowledge sharing.
Design/methodology/approach: The present research takes a positivist and quantitative
approach. It applies an experimental methodology. In order to investigate the research
conceptual framework empirically, a survey was pre-tested and post-tested. A chatbot
experiment was applied to explore the effect of AI on the respondents’ recognition of civic
engagement. The chatbot experiment was placed in between the pre and the post tests and it
was applied on the sample of the research. The survey was given to a sample of 385 university
students and staff members. The returned questionnaires were (68.3%).
Findings: The data analysis process guided the researcher to conclude that according to the
social capital theory there are two significant components of social capital which are bridging
and bonding social capital. In the context of AI, social media is a perfect representation of
social capital, as it has many effects on the processes of engagement in the community. In
addition, the models of social capital theory are broadly employed in the research in terms of
knowledge sharing and social behavior. However, a combination of social capital and social
exchange theories should be used to better recognize the integration of knowledge sharing and
social media. Further to that the theories in the available related literature are not sufficient to
understand the relationship between social capital and civic engagement, in the presence and
absence of knowledge sharing, in an environment characterized by AI.
Contributions and implications:
The current thesis makes four main theoretical contributions:
The first contribution assumes that AI can be used to examine the social sciences; especially,
to evaluate how knowledge sharing with the help of social science can be effective if used
along with technology to improve the society in many ways.
The second contribution assumes that technology can be used to develop social capital;
especially when technology is integrated. this means that integrating AI into social capital can
positively change social capital positively. The third contribution in assumes that civic engagement when integrating AI into civic
engagement as in the experiment, civic engagement shows compliance with AI. This means
the willingness to use AI was increased, this also means there is more trust in AI. AI no is never
against the values of the social capital since it can bring prosperity to humanity.
The fourth contribution assumes that knowledge sharing impacts social capital directly. It is
vital to use the proper knowledge sharing tools to let the community participate in the process
of learning and development of the AI technology and overcome the technology disengagement.
The findings of the research are applicable for the civic engagement sector in the
Kingdom of Bahrain and the other countries with similar characteristics. The findings of the
research can be applied to enhance participation in civic engagement domain. This is because
government shows how social media can lead to greater participation through the benefits of
knowledge sharing.
The findings of the research can provide incentives for users who are students or
citizens to participate in civic engagement practices.
Recommendations:
Future research is required that can correlate social capital and leadership in the government
and private sectors in the Kingdom of Bahrain.
An assessment should be made of the relationship between knowledge sharing and quality of
performance in different types of organization in Bahrain
Deliberation, Representation, Equity
"What can we learn about the development of public interaction in e-democracy from a drama delivered by mobile headphones to an audience standing around a shopping center in a Stockholm suburb? In democratic societies there is widespread acknowledgment of the need to incorporate citizens’ input in decision-making processes in more or less structured ways. But participatory decision making is balancing on the borders of inclusion, structure, precision and accuracy. To simply enable more participation will not yield enhanced democracy, and there is a clear need for more elaborated elicitation and decision analytical tools.
This rigorous and thought-provoking volume draws on a stimulating variety of international case studies, from flood risk management in the Red River Delta of Vietnam, to the consideration of alternatives to gold mining in Roșia Montană in Transylvania, to the application of multi-criteria decision analysis in evaluating the impact of e-learning opportunities at Uganda's Makerere University.
Editors Love Ekenberg (senior research scholar, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis [IIASA], Laxenburg, professor of Computer and Systems Sciences, Stockholm University), Karin Hansson (artist and research fellow, Department of Computer and Systems Sciences, Stockholm University), Mats Danielson (vice president and professor of Computer and Systems Sciences, Stockholm University, affiliate researcher, IIASA) and Göran Cars (professor of Societal Planning and Environment, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm) draw innovative collaborations between mathematics, social science, and the arts.
They develop new problem formulations and solutions, with the aim of carrying decisions from agenda setting and problem awareness through to feasible courses of action by setting objectives, alternative generation, consequence assessments, and trade-off clarifications.
As a result, this book is important new reading for decision makers in government, public administration and urban planning, as well as students and researchers in the fields of participatory democracy, urban planning, social policy, communication design, participatory art, decision theory, risk analysis and computer and systems sciences.
Fracking the online: An exploration of the digital in shaping contention over shale gas
This thesis applies a post-political lens to online activity on shale gas, using Lancashire, England as its case study. Its focus is upon the ways in which online activity may both contribute to, and constrain, the expression of dissent. It argues there is a dual gap in the current literature: empirically, in considering how online activity may be influencing the development of the debate and theoretically, in how we conceive of conflict over shale gas. It seeks to address these gaps using a combination of 37 stakeholder interviews and social media postings from anti-shale gas groups.
The first results chapter draws from post-political theory to build a framework through which to understand the conflict over shale gas in England. It identifies three main areas of dispute: over the legitimate modes for public participation in the debate; over the scope of the threat presented by development, and over the credibility of existing knowledge on shale gas. The second results chapter uses this framework to consider the role of online information in the developing dispute. It shows how a lack of technical information led to an online information divide which constrained how the dominant institutional actors engaged online. Anti-shale gas campaigners remained relatively unconstrained but the substantial burden of online activism contributed towards perceptions of disempowerment, spurring a move to direct action. The third results chapter applies a collective action frame analysis to social media postings aimed at mobilising supporters to take part in direct action. It argues that while mobilising on social media has significant advantages for campaigners, it also has the potential to dilute a movement’s messages amidst pressure to maintain local approbation. The apparent paradoxical effects of digitally mediated activism and the implications for practice and theory are discussed in the final chapter, alongside recommendations for future research.
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