Environmental state and information politics - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 142

by computers, advanced technological monitoring (such as satellites)
and new information-processing schemes. Next to the fact that these
digital technologies have more data-processing capacity, speed and
accessibility, they are also believed to change the modes of governance
towards electronic governance.

3. E 2 -governance

Every revolution in communication technology has given birth to
utopias of conflictless democracy and governance, as well as of fur-
ther rational planning efforts and state control. The electronic and
cyberrevolutions of the 1990s initially let to equal high expectations
of e-governance, e-administration and e-democracy, but soon also met
pessimism and scepticism on the materialisation of these promises and
the unwelcome side effects.
The notion of electronic governance or e-governance is widely dis-
cussed and entails a wide set of meanings, interpretations and prac-
tices in numerous areas of policy making and rule making. 12 In its
widest connotation, it refers to all electronic activities by or on behalf
of governmental authorities in the policy-making and implementation
process. It then entails everything from electronic information dissem-
ination on plans and measures to shifting part of the policy-making
process itself from face-to-face to electronic exchanges and inter-
actions. The practices of e-governance vary across the nation-states of
the world. Table 6.1 provides evidence of the large divide in e-services
on national governmental Web sites in different parts of the world.
Using three sets of indicators for e-governance (related to information
availability, service delivery and public access), West ( 2005 ) found that
the countries with the most advanced e-governance systems were not
only located in North America, Europe and East Asia, but they were
definitely not located in Africa, Central Asia and the Middle East. 13

12

In the United States, the federal E-Government Act was approved in 2002, and
before that there was an increased commitment by the government to
Internet-based public participation strategies (cf. Zavestoski and Shulman,
2002 ). Also, in many other OECD countries, certain parts of electronic
governance are getting more and more mainstream. Since 2004, the Journal of
E-Government is being published - digitally, of course.

13

In 2005, the top ten nations with e-governance, according to these indicators,
were Taiwan, Singapore, the United States, Hong Kong, China, Canada,
Germany, Australia, Ireland and the Vatican. This was only slightly different in
2004.