Trust and Reputation in Digital Environments: A Judicial Inkling on E-Governance and M-Governance

Introduction

The developments in the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) world have made it possible for citizens to interact with the government remotely in a convenient manner without physically visiting any government office. In the context and perspective of Electronic Service Delivery (2011), e-Governance is about the making use of ICT in systems of governance for a wide range participation and an intense involvement of citizens, institutions, civil society groups and the private sector in the decision making process of governance. Therefore the need for government process to re-engineer governance using Information Technology to simplify and make the governance processes more efficient which is critical for transformation to take place by making the delivery of government services more effective across various government domains.

The United Nations defines e-Government as the use of ICT and its application by the government for the provision of information and public services to the people. There is no doubt about the multitude of definition and at the same time no fixed definition of e-Governance. Several different agencies have tried to define this term according to their own objectives and requirements. The term ‘e-Government’ is also used in place of ‘e-Governance’. The Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD 2005) and Kyem (2016) perceived e-Government to be the use of information and communication technologies, and particularly the internet, as a tool to achieve better government.

The World Bank (2015); Banerjee, Duflo, Imbert, Mathew and Pande (2016) also opined that e-Government refers to the use by government agencies of information technologies gadgets and utilities (such as Wide Area Networks, the Internet, and mobile computing) that have the ability to transform relations with citizens, businesses, and other arms of government. E-Government aims to make the interaction between government and citizens (G2C), government and business enterprises (G2B), and inter-agency relationships within the government sector (G2G) more friendly, convenient, transparent, and inexpensive.

E-Governance and m-Governance is also described by Agrawal, Sethi and Mittal (2015) and Meijer (2015) as a process of reform in the way government works, shares information, engages citizens and delivers services to external and internal clients for the benefit of both government and the clients that they serve. Specifically, E-Government sectors harnesses information technologies such as Wide Area Network (WAN), Internet, World Wide Web (www) and mobile computing to reach out to citizens, businesses and other arms of the government. E-Governance has vast objectives but potent among them include to make government administration more transparent, speedy and accountable, in order to addressing the society's needs and expectations through efficient public services and effective interaction between the people, business groups, sub nationalities and the entire government structure.

It is important to note that United Nations e-Governance survey (2016) revealed that E-government has grown rapidly over the past 15 years, since the first attempt of the United Nations to benchmark e-government in 2001. In the 2016 Survey, 29 countries score “very-high”, with e-government development index (EGDI) values in the range of 0.75 to 1.00, as compared to only 10 countries in 2003. Since 2014, all 193 Member States of the UN have delivered some form of online presence. E-government is now ubiquitous in many more countries, a stark contrast in comparison to 2003 – when 18 countries or about ten percent (10%) of countries globally were without any online presence. Fifty one percent (51%) of countries had “low-EGDI” or “medium EGDI” values in 2016, as compared to over seventy three percent (73%) of countries in 2003 (United Nations Survey 2016a; 2016b).