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A tutorial on Electronic Governance for Sustainable Development (EGOV4SD) was delivered on the first day of the ICEGOV2011 conference in Tallinn, Estonia following the keynote lecture by the Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves. The tutorial was prepared by Tomasz Janowski in collaboration with Adegboyega Ojo and Elsa Estevez, all from the UNU-IIST Centre for Electronic Governance, and Maria Wimmer from the University of Koblenz-Landau. In the first part of the tutorial, Tomasz Janowski introduced the concept of EGOV4SD and explored how Electronic Governance (EGOV) can advance the social, environmental, economic and transitional Sustainable Development (SD) goals. In particular, he: 1) presented the innovation context, definition, changing focus – from technological through organizational to socio-economic, and various dimensions of EGOV – Government, Technology, Interaction, Customers and Society; 2) explained the meaning and possible conceptualization of EGOV in the development and sustainable development contexts; and 3) provided possible mappings between EGOV dimensions and various objectives pursued to fulfil the social, environmental, economic and transitional SD goals. For example, he proposed that social sustainability includes the “access for all” objective, and mapped this objective to the EGOV Technology dimension by “considering accessibility – cost, ability to use, etc. of all segments of society in technology choices and support for mobile channels for service delivery” and to the EGOV Society dimension by “participation of different members of the society and efforts not to exacerbate the existing digital divide”. The presentation included highlights of EGOV strategies pursued by Singapore (2015), Korea (2012), Estonia (2013) and European Union (2015); global EGOV surveys by United Nations (2010) and Waseda University (2011); and concrete EGOV initiatives aimed at specific SD goals.
In the second part of the tutorial, Maria Wimmer explained how open government and policy development can help realize EGOV4SD. In particular, she: 1) explained the challenges and demands of information technology-enabled governance and policy development, 2) described how such challenges are being addressed through scenario building and integration with formal policy models as part of the EU-funded Open Collaboration for Policy Modelling (OCOPOMO) project, and 3) announced the launch of a new EU-funded project eGovPoliNet aimed at building a global multidisciplinary digital governance and policy modelling research and practice community.
More information about the conference and the EGOV4SD tutorial is available here |
