Presentation delivered at the Institute for
African Development, Cornell University, September 2nd, 1999
Electronic governance and commercial
development in Africa: the grass roots perspective.
Margaret Grieco,
Professor of Organisation and Development Management,
The Business School University of North London
and
Senior Visiting Fellow,
Institute for African Development,
Cornell University
Web site: http://www.geocities.com/margaret_grieco
E-mail: msgrieco@aol.com
and
Len Holmes,
Senior Lecturer Organisation and Employment Studies,
University of North London
Abstract:
This presentation explores the emergence of
the concept of 'governance' and speculates on the opportunities provided by new
electronic technologies for the development of more participatory forms of
governance than those experienced in the past. The presentation identifies the
possibilities for direct democracy and the greater use of client/user feedback
in the shaping of governance structures. Governance - the collective management
of resources and order - is not simply a matter of the relationship between a
national society and its government: in the contemporary world, the
international institutions have become, de facto, part of the governance
structure of developing countries and electronic feedback systems can be
utilised by the grassroots of developing countries to influence and shape the
'governance' of the international institutions. The presentation draws
attention to the transparency and global visibility enhancing characteristics
of the new information technologies: the behaviour of all strata of society are
rendered more transparent with the instant auditing capabilities of the technology.
Enhanced transparency enables the grassroots to better monitor the behaviour of
its leaders and such information equity has consequences for empowerment and
consequently economic position. The electronic technologies which are
increasingly used for global trade and commerce and increasingly vital to the
economic welfare of all societies have clear consequences for social and
political bargaining within states which have historically experienced
restricted access to information at the level of the grassroots.
1. The emergence of
'governance' in the vocabulary of the international institutions.
'Governance' is a term which is increasingly found in the policy documents of
the international institutions. It is a term which is equally distrusted by many
in the countries which have high levels of engagement with the international
institutions and agencies. To understand the current use of the term, it is
necessary to look at the history of the World Bank which developed under
express prohibitions in respect of taking an active hand in the politics of the
countries that it operated within. The analysis which assumed that the
activities of the World Bank could ever be purely technical and have no
political content was a highly naïve one - as any experienced political
theorist would rapidly confirm. Over the course of time and particularly in
respect of gender politics, the term 'empowerment ' began to take hold and
provide a toned down vocabulary for addressing political issues.
In the wake of the term 'empowerment',
'governance' has appeared as a term which permits the international agencies to
engage with the politics of recipient countries without challenging head on the
political prohibition installed in their charters and constitutions.
'Governance' has come to be used to mean 'the equitable or poverty reducing use
of collective resources'. The requirement to display practices of good
governance, a clearly political agenda, has been smuggled into the
international institutional requirements for project grants and loans.
This concept of 'governance' links with
current discussions on 'social capital' and 'civil society' (see World Bank social capital home
page). At the heart of the social capital and civil society policy discourse
currently playing in the international institutions is the notion that
extensive and generalised relationships of trust are critical to society's
effective economic functioning and that such relationships of trust are more
prevalent where populations are actively involved in and are members of a
proliferation of voluntary associations. This view of the relationship between
social capital and civil society, it should be noted, is a highly ethnocentric
one: the kinship structures of Africa studied in great depth by the classical
anthropologists, and from which we get our key social capital term 'generalised
net exchange', have been disregarded in this hot new social analysis climate.
The new 'governance' discourse clearly
requires adjustment. In her presentation to the Institute for African
Development and in this seminar series, Professor N'dri T. Assie-Lumumba drew
our attention to the way in which the blame for the failure of past expert
advice has been loaded onto Africa by the international agencies with little
reflexivity on the part of these agencies about their own role in such
failures. The 'governance' movement with its focus on 'own management of
resources' is viewed from her perspective as simply another movement in the
same direction. 'Good governance' discipline, as presently practiced, ignores
the constraints faced by developing countries.
In this presentation, while understanding
why such views have come to be held, we wish to point up some of the
opportunities that the 'governance' movement offers. Firstly, despite the havoc
undoubtedly wreaked by colonialism on Africa, many distinctive African social
capital structures are still in place and could be used in a good governance
model. Secondly, new electronic technologies currently being used by the
international agencies and emerging rapidly in Africa provide opportunities for
the transparency of governance structures at local, national and international
levels. In seeking 'good governance' the stress should be on transparency and
accountability in the context of such transparency: good governance is not
simply a technical matter of outcome, lower levels of poverty, but is also a
matter of process, the poor must have the opportunity to participate in policy.
Transparency can substitute in many respects for the social capital structures
of history: social capital structures were the mechanisms and screens for
determining and enforcing reliable behaviour in a world of information which
was highly imperfect. The greater the ability to independently ascertain the
accuracy of information or the reliability of a partner for transaction
(economic, social or political) the less important social capital structures
are. In the new information age, it is auditing protocols and structures that
are critical. This is not to argue that new forms of social capital and new
forms of civil society will not develop upon the basis of this new
transparency: indeed, we have already seen the development of electronic
advocacy and electronic politics in many developing country locations.
2. Electronic governance: breaking
preconceptions of the relationship between poverty and technology
In developing good governance structures within Africa there is a need to break
the existing preconceptions about the relationship between poverty and
technology: the almost universal assumption of the educated is that the poor
can not make use of technology. Yet in the Kalahari desert of southern Africa
illiterate bushmen are currently using a hand held, solar powered, satellite
linked computer technology for purposes of environmental management: the
Cybertracker developed in South Africa has a set of icons which the bushmen
activate in the counting of the animal life. It also has an etch a sketch
function which enables the bushmen to draw objects other than the defined icons
and to transmit these objects through the satellite link to a reception centre.
Precisely the same technology which is
already operating in Africa could be used to summon emergency vehicles such as
ambulances or to schedule collective journeys by summoning a hired bus or
vehicle to a village for marketing and commercial purposes. Similarly, such
technologies can be used in transmitting the social and political wishes of
villages and communities to central, regional or international governance
agencies. The ability to directly express a wish or view immediately and
globally outside of a literacy framework is now available: it has neither been
adequately conceptualised or utilised by those very international agencies
seeking to promote good governance.
This discussion introduces the concept of
'oculacy': in the new information age our ability to rapidly transmit and
receive the visual image and to track the spatial location of that image opens
up checks on authenticity and abilities to audit beyond imagination a decade
ago. The ability to combine the immediate transmission of a visual image with
aural or audio enhancement from any location no matter the state of its
existing infrastructure opens up the prospect of new policy processes and
protocols. In the past, the grassroots did not have the capability of
transmitting its view or perspective on the world directly and immediately onto
the global stage. The distributed character of the new technology - a message
can be launched from any and every venue to any and every other - has received
little policy focus in terms of improving upon governance structures but the
development of electronic advocacy through grassroots and international agency
channels as a matter of technical practice begins to raise the policy question
(http://www.globalknowledge.org
).
The international agencies and governments
have begun to develop client feed back systems which in many ways reflect the
organisation of the consumer and client feed back systems that were their
precursors. The issue now is how these client or citizen feed back systems can
be better developed to assist in the policy process. In effect, the suggestion
here is that electronic client feed back systems used within the global
governance structure of the international agencies can make substantial
contributions to the development of social capital and civic society. It
provides a channel for the development and articulation of views and interests,
a channel which can provide safety measures such as anonymity in societies
where challenge places the challenger in considerable danger. The development
of such systems can already be found within the political web sites which have
formed in the context of Malaysian politics (http://www.re-skill.org.uk/papers/malaysia.htm ).
International agencies such as the World
Bank have both the technology and the institutional option of including all
levels of clients in their policy process even from the most remote locations.
The Bank has developed a complex system with a variety of levels of access to
shared cyber-spaces where Bank staff and others from remote locations interact
around projects and policies. There is the need for a discussion about how much
more open a process this could become and the extent to which technologies
which promoted participation through oculacy could open this process up.
Similarly, there is an imperative upon
international agencies seeking to promote good governance to assist in
developing auditing protocols and procedures which increase both the
transparency of government options and actions and the transparency of
international agency options and actions to the population at large. Good
governance is a product of openness and not of closed bargaining which denies
affected populations the information equity necessary to evaluation and subsequently
challenge to correct misbehaviour if necessary. Transparency can through new
technologies be imposed upon authority or constructed authorities: the
behaviour of elites becomes visible and challengeable within this mode. There
is then a need for discussion about the boundaries of confidentiality in the
interaction between an international agency and a government which the
technology raises: can international agencies be complicit in bargaining which
is withheld from the majority of a national society and a society that is
severely impacted by the consequences of that bargaining? The technical
possibility of extensive consultation and extensive communication through new
information technologies raises new moral issues. The electronic governance
options of the international agencies require a thorough consideration of the
design of knowledge management and consultation systems: the development of
appropriate systems for input into such de facto electronic governance systems
is a matter of urgency.
3. Getting to grips with
corruption: the benefits of transparency.
Currently discussions of corruption in Africa have surfaced as explicit tasks
for development agency attention and action (see World
Bank anti-corruption knowledge center). In practice, the flight of capital
from Africa has for a long time stood as a measure of problems within the trust
and social capital system of the continent.
At one level, those who have accumulated
substantial wealth within the African continent are uneasy about the likelihood
of this wealth being alienated and so transfer resources to external and
'safer' locations. At another level, wealth is frequently transferred out of
Africa because it has been accumulated in a corrupt fashion. Such wealth is
often transferred under conditions of secrecy, a secrecy which is possible
because of the behaviour of the receiving institutions of the first world -
most particularly the international banks.
The auditing capabilities of the new
technology can do much to reveal where resources have been drained off from
donor projects, government income or other related activities. Indeed, the
recent round of exposure of corruption in Russia owes its emergence to patterns
revealed by an intelligent audit of the location and distribution of
international assistance.
Historically the evidence of corruption lay
in identification through conspicuous indicators such as the conspicuous
spending of the official or his/ her household and would require an act of
social challenge for its resolution. Transparency through intelligent auditing
procedures, as opposed to relying on conspicuous indicators, opens up paths for
better and more equitable governance. And given the insistence on poverty
reduction as the mark of good governance, it is difficult to imagine that this
characteristic of the new technology will remain neglected for much longer (www.netaid.org).
4. E-commerce: a global business
practice.
So far we have concentrated upon the importance of the new information forms
for good governance, however, the technology used for delivering such political
and social organisation also has a very important economic face (http://www.undp.org/info21/e-com/e2.html
). Exactly the same technologies use in the development of consultation systems
can be used as a path for economic development (http://www.peoplink.org/).
E-trading (http://www.untpdc.org)
is already a major commercial feature of the developing world, most
particularly Asia (www.sewa.org).
Within Africa, there has already been
pathbreaking activity in respect of e-forms (http://www.re-skill.org.uk/papers/bitworld.htm ). There has
been a proliferation of web sites marketing African goods which enable the
customer to purchase goods on line: in addition, the development of e-malls
which collect together the web sites of a range of traders has begun to take
hold (http://www.steerage.co.za/aism
).
Such forms open up the prospect of community
businesses which enable women to gain greater bargaining power in the economic
exchange despite their heavily constricted mobility. The development agencies,
after a slow start, have begun to wake up to the opportunities that the e-form
can offer the poor ( http://www.itu.int/ECDC/english-home.htm ).
African governments, unlike some of the governments of the pacific area, have
not yet seen the light. However, the benefits that e-servicing and e-scheduling
offer resource poor states should not be underestimated and commercial agencies
have begun to see the potential market with Plessey Malawi moving precisely
into this area of activity.
E-forms can be used not only for servicing
and scheduling the activities of populations which are poorly served by
existing infrastructure (http://www.geocities.com/margaret_grieco/working/space.html
)and enable them to connect with global markets but can also be used for
technical development and training and skilling. A clear discussion of the
potential of e-forms in terms of skill transference, transformation and
capacity building has still to take place. But when it does it is important
that the oculacy capabilities of the new technology remain clearly in view
throughout the policy and skill building process.
5. Conclusion: technology a tool
for the grassroots.
In concluding, we wish to place three key topics on the agenda for further
discussion; these are:
Disintermediation refers to the capability
of the technology to remove brokers from social and economic action and enable
direct communication and trade between parties. The grass roots can now
articulate their own agenda on a global stage and in the presence of
international agencies without the need of experts as intermediaries. This
competence will have an impact for the internal bargaining structures of
Africa.
Asynchronicity indicates round the clock
access to key information sources and the ability to undertake activities
without the tight coupling of the schedules of the communicating parties. At a
practical level it means that grass root messages can enter institutions
through virtual means outside of regular business hours so that the negative
impact of differences in time zones on the bargaining power of the poor is
reduced.
Oculacy refers to the opportunities to
communicate through forms other than literacy: a very important issue when the
equation of poverty with illiteracy remains so strong in a modern world. Freire
(1972) in his powerful analysis of the path to literacy stressed the importance
of the relevance of the message being communicated if knowledge was to be
acquired. The prospect of oculacy, and in the path of Freire, raises new
pedagogic questions - one of which is certainly whether the price of
participation requires the burden and investment of coding experience
(learning) as opposed to direct communication.
For the technology to do its work in
generating equity, it is necessary for the international agencies and
governments to undertake significant policy activity in organising ready
community access to the technology. It is in the character of satellite based
communication that the expensive equipment is orbital and must necessarily
traverse the space above poor nations: the development of solar powered hand
held equipment greatly reduces the communication costs to low income areas.
Good governance can develop upon this fortuitous patterning of resources: the
question is will it?
Reference:
Freire, P. (1972) Pedagogy of the Oppressed,
Harmondsworth: Penguin
