Nature of the field of e-governance

e-governance is virtual interactions of monitoring agencies and contacting agencies via e-mail. The interval between e-governance and e government convergence establishes opportunities to carry out more convenient practices, that is, by extrapolations of both e-government’s administrative customer transactions and e-governance’s citizen interactions. When e-governance and e government next converge that blatant tensions emerge between them. As the two variables incite both positive and negative effects, these tensions can have possible lingering costs for governance. Optimally, as long as union maintains a steady-state equilibrium, positive outcomes persist such as continuing e government’s virtual agencies and e-governance’s virtual governance. Sub-optimally, negative results spillover as convergence leads both e-government and e-governance to incline towards their opposite axes with damaging impacts on governance.
The application of e-governance is beginning to change, in some small ways, the traditional hierarchal forms of government. To deliver public services electronically, new types of interactions are often needed between departments or agencies, which are in turn changing the internal dynamics of government. The rise of e-governance is part of e-evolution which is also altering the relationship between government and citizen. Many governments are pledging to move in this direction but progress towards results has been slow. The precepts are easy to articulate but attaining desired results is proving to be more difficult to achieve. Part of this can be explained through the hierarchal nature of organisations and the current role of representative government in democratic societies. External groups and individuals, on an international scale, are working to change this dynamic. But governments are moving at a slower and different pace than groups and citizens who are using the Internet to influence the evolution of government programmes, policy and legislative implementations.
The potential of e-governance to empower the citizen has been the subject of much discussion. Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) offer access to worldwide information, increased capacity to communicate and interact online, as well as a host of other rich experiences to individuals with the means to access them. Governments around the world have developed many programmes to cross the digital divides that exist in their own countries and stimulate their economies through grants, investment and other mechanisms. But to empowerment of the citizen having an impact on government or the political process, there is still a long way to go before the dream and ideal of e-governance is reached.
Tools are being developed for online consultations between the government, citizen, action groups and business. But the results are limited. There is much discussion and interaction between groups and citizens and, to a certain extent, between government and the citizenry. However e-governance is evolving within society more on the level of group to group and peer-to-peer interactions with participants using ICTs to enhance and better their lives. The latter is a form of e-governance that has minimal influence from government, except to the degree that people might use online or offline government information to further their work. Community and online groups work well when these people are driven by individual interest, no matter what the cause.
e governance, in relation to government and how we are governed, if and when it takes hold as a mass movement will have to be driven by a large section of the population who firstly, want to participate actively in government at some level and secondly, are willing to see a new form of governance evolve.
The change will depend on the degree to which people want to be more engaged in government and on the emergence of new political thinkers who will think through to the next evolution of governance.
ICTs are putting a certain amount of power, albeit a small one to date, in the hands of the citizen at large. e-governance is alive and vibrant, through citizens and interest groups, in many jurisdictions around the world, but in terms of government budgets, funding allocated to governance programmes has been limited compared to the billions spent on e governance. National administrations and large corporations control the current e-governance proposals on a local, state/provincial, national and international scale. The latter is promoting particular technologies, especially for online voting, but also evolving technologies that will better serve the needs of the citizens coming to government web sites.
Through the new technologies being developed, a non-linear world of time and distance is merging in people's minds, and the world is being seen in new dimensions not known before in our history. It is this potential that will drive the change in our society. It is not necessarily because there is a younger generation coming up who are integrated with the technology and have adapted it with effortlessness. Moderately, it is the potential of what these technologies can do that holds within the minds of so many the seed of change. We have only begun to realize the true dimension and scale of where-governance might go with e-governance.