At a time when the British government is under fire for its plans to introduce electronic identification, it is worth asking if citizens really care about the on-line public services that are enabled by the adoption of electronic identification and which are at the heart of so many e-government initiatives.
The Scandinavians seem to be taking a pragmatic view that electronic public services cannot be delivered without electronic IDs and their citizens seem to value top-quality services more than they value privacy. The vocal British, who want privacy more than they want to see the spread of government, represent the opposite camp.
Mark Frequin of the Dutch ministry of economic affairs expresses the government point-of-view rather well: “Today’s citizen wants freedom – till the moment that something happens. At that point they want government to protect them.”
As governments strive to be more citizen-focused, they “need to engage with citizens who are increasingly interested in what they do,” says Colm Butler in the Irish Prime Minister’s Office. “This has huge implications for making public services electronic and open to all citizens.”
Steve Coleman, professor of e-democracy at Oxford University, is less sanguine about the prospect of governments engaging with citizens. “From all the talk, you would think there was a real relationship beginning to happen,” said Coleman. “The actual situation is that we have had a ritualistic charade: both sides pretend to listen to each other but neither does. As a result, we have e-government without government and e-democracy without the people.”
Jane Fountain, professor of government at Harvard, is even more condemnatory of today’s e-government initiatives: “eGov and online services are a set of solutions pushed by bright, gleaming professional services firms and we are trying to figure out how to use them. We are in the thrall of data, measures, indicators. But without a framework or theory of government, then these measures are empty.”
In fact, the efforts that governments go to make their on-line services as seamless and frictionless as possible is counter-productive, according to Fountain. Acquiring knowledge and wisdom has always been a costly exercise that requires the full engagement of the acquirer. Making the acquisition of public services knowledge completely friction-free only lowers the engagement between government and citizen.
If Fountain is right, she would be challenging one of the key precepts of not just e-government but the prevailing orthodoxy of technology development.
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