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to reduce elite capture (Hossain et al., 2018). The target here would be to improve the efficacy of
people as individuals and members of communities socially or geographically. The third phase
starts with the active collaboration with citizens using ICTs for budget planning and distribution
of resources for the people they are meant for. This phase would be contingent on the success of
the last two phases and would need better levels of accountability and transparency in government
processes. With active recognition and awarding of participation efforts, governments can increase
the public value of participation, making it socially sustainable (Bataineh & Abu-Shanab, 2016; Gupta
& Suri, 2017).
The last phase of the conceptual model depicts the overlap PB shares with a deliberative democratic setup. We can only reach the utopian levels of DG when we have a participation-friendly base
in the socio-political system to start with. Deliberative citizenship is the outcome of active and voluntary participation from citizens in local governance issues in their communities or geographical areas
(Baogang, 2018). The action points laid out in the literature cover both the government and citizen
issues. Governments must ensure the availability of deliberative platforms on which people could
share, discuss and build consensus upon a common set of ideas and rules that govern them. The citizens are also expected to actively contribute to the deliberations to keep the conversation going as the
policy outcomes, and associated social good would be contingent on the same (van der Merwe &
Meehan, 2012). Such deliberative platforms would help achieve better transparency and accountability
for governance and enable the people to consult on and contribute to policy decisions.
Our model would help researchers to better understand the phenomenon of DCE for better e-governance in developing nations. It could be used as a base to study the growth and establishment of
information societies of the future in which cities and villages would be ‘smart’. Every household and
individual would be connected to each other and the Government and their service providers. This
study attempts to give a macro view of the process of digital era governance with the active participation of people as prosumers of government services and initiatives to solve administrative and social
problems at a local or national scale. This differentiates our paper from other ICT4D papers as most of
them are focused on a single issue or a single instance from one of the identified themes. However,
they acknowledge the presence of different contextual factors but do not explore them in detail as
it falls out of scope of their study. Their contributions are also crucial as, without the detailed micro
accounts of those studies, it would not have been possible to develop this conceptual framework
for DCE. Our conceptual model focuses explicitly on the problem of citizen empowerment as that is
the key to sustainable participation crucial for the success of any collaborative governance initiatives
in digital societies of the future. Our study outlines the overall process of digital society development
by defining it in a phased-out matter and laying down specific policy action points to focus on based
on the different guiding objectives or problems of different phases of development.

8. Implications for practice
We studied the triadic model of State-Citizen-Service-Providers interaction, covering the flow of
accountability and the factors that affect these interactions in the context of policymaking for
digital empowerment. The paper created an overview of various strategies for the political empowerment of citizens using digital means, and from this a conceptual model (Figure 8) for working
towards the digital empowerment of citizens was derived. The DCE framework can help governments at different phases of developing e-governance capability to focus and actualize their
efforts to foster and create the information societies of the future wherein governance would be
enabled via democratic platforms with equal powers and associated accountability for all stakeholders in the triad. The action points given in this model give out specific policy objectives to be
targeted for delivering empowerment to the people. These factors could also be seen as points of
policy evaluation in the context of DCE. The model also accounts for the rapidly changing nature
of technology and how it interacts with social and political factors in any setting to deliver policy
goals targeting the overall improvement of human capital and societal good.