Article Preview
Top1. Introduction
M-governance refers to the use of mobile devices to deliver governance services. In developing countries, m-governance bridges the digital divide between rural and urban areas, considering the low cost of ownership and deep penetration of mobile. Collaborative m-governance is seen as a possible remedy and facilitating strategy for delivering good governance. It allows citizens to engage in policy discourse, enhancing their quality of life and overall public administration (Awotwi, 2011; Tomer, Chauhan and Panigrahi, 2016; Pai and Alathur, 2019). Institutionalised use of social media and user-generated content to improve governance can help promote bottom-up participation and empower citizens (Chanana, Agrawal and Punia, 2016; Wang and Medaglia, 2017; Hebbar and Kiran, 2020).
In developing countries, m-governance is gaining much traction with a significant increase in the country’s coverage and penetration, enabling the next wave of information and communication technologies (ICTs) offering government-to-citizen (G2C) services. There were more than 1,200 million smartphones in India alone as of 2018 (TRAI, 2018), and there will be more than 442 million smartphone users in India by 2022 (Statista, 2020). This transformation is also being pushed due to the pandemic situation (Ridhwan & Hargreaves, 2021; Ross, 2021),and the promotion of citizen usage of governance applications such as ‘Arogya Setu’ and the rise in remote work and learning (Gupta et al., 2020; Nagel, 2020; Criado and Guevara-Gómez, 2021). The advent of digital identities have made this interaction easier, establishing the user identities for government services (Mir et al., 2021). Researchers have established the need for m-governance adoption for effective public service delivery to facilitate multi-channel developmental possibilities (Kumar et al., 2018; Kumar, Sachan and Mukherjee, 2018). Balancing government control with citizen collaboration through digital public policy co-creation in developing nations is crucial for improving electronic service delivery for governance (Ansong & Boateng, 2019; Mukhopadhyay & Bouwman, 2019; Bongomin & Ntayi, 2020; Sharma et al., 2022). In India, customer service centres (CSCs) have been the primary drivers in delivering e-services to the people (Gupta and Maurya, 2020; Dwivedi et al., 2016), but they are just another infomediary. This study attempts to examine how governments in developing countries like India could deliver services directly through smartphones which are constant companions of people today (Stanforth, 2007). The motivation behind this is to eliminate various types and levels of intermediaries in the supply chain for governance services. On the one hand, this would reduce the opportunities of corruption and the overall cost of delivering e-services to the citizens. Moreover, on the other hand, we can promote easier and more convenient citizen participation in the administrative process using their phones.
This marks the base for two fundamental questions in the context of our study:
RQ1. What are the factors that can facilitate the use of smartphones for collaborative governance?
RQ2. How are these factors interrelated and what is their role in the development of a collaborative m-governance ecosystem in developing countries?