e-governance and citizen information - Universitat Oberta de ...

E-governance and Citizen Information 36 Theoretical Framework. The Network AdministrationAll in all, governance introduces a new focus that can be used to observe the changes in thearticulation of power, incorporating the supranational, regional and local government levels, includingthe private sector and civil society. The analysis of government does not try to reject aperspective focused on the Administration; on the contrary, it aims to incorporate new elementsthat interact in the management of the public space. In this sense, as stated by Peters and Pierre(2005), the concept appears to have been created to depict an effective change in society as ananalytical tool generated by social scientists for the improvement of the quality of prior analyses.In addition, as mentioned above, the newly created New Public Management (NPM), has alsohad a relevant role in the questioning of the traditional Public Administration and a significant influenceon the design of policies for the administrative reform, especially in the Anglo-Saxonworld.2.3.6. Governance and New Public ManagementEven though the theories of governance have tended to be contrasted with New Public Management,we can state that the former is a political theory while the latter is an administrativetheory (Ewalt, 2001). Peters and Pierre (1999) states that the coincidence between both theorieslies in the emphasis on the dissolution of the limits between the public and private sectors.NPM is orientated on results, while governance analyses the processes and in somecases the resources employed to provide balance to a system that acts with greater autonomy.There is agreement on the need to incorporate new actors to public management activities,partly to support the provision of services, despite the tax deficit and decline of the “producer”role previously held by the state (Pierre and Peters, 2001). In this sense, the ICT industry isconsolidated as the dominant competition of the private sector which will then become the providerof the public sector.Despite these basic agreements, some authors indicate that there is a danger of some servicesand systems being privatised, e.g. to avoid internal difficulties in the governmental integrationof back office functions (Dunleavy and Margetts, 2000). Fountain (2005) arguesthat privatisation in the e-government sphere can be an error because the negotiations tointroduce technology include negotiations that require a learning and cultural adaptationprocess. At this point, the problems appear in the mutual reinforcement of various elements.The fragmentation and autonomy of departments, in addition to the outsourcing of IT services– as required for each department to follow a different strategy in the incorporation anduse of ICTs – would generate excessively differentiated contexts.http://www.uoc.edu/in3/pic