INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY FOR DEVELOPMENT

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Our findings outline a phased-out plan to develop knowledge societies with empowered citizens
and break down all these phases into specific policy objectives based on theoretical understating
and building upon governance use-cases worldwide. For example, let’s take the case of the first
phase, i.e. ICT infrastructure for all. It is the outcome of the MCSD strategy and includes three
broad policy goals: first, ensuring basic levels of digital literacy in the citizen population; second, providing affordable and fast access to the internet, and third, developing and deploying the regionwide physical ICT infrastructure. Based on our understanding from the literature about government
initiatives worldwide, we can see how these policy objectives are critical and instrumental in reaching necessary policy outcome and successfully implementing the strategy of MCSD. In the same way,
we can explain and expand this understanding for all the phases of developing the information
society and deliver DCE covered in the model. All the phases are drawn out from different stages
of information systems development. They can act as guideposts for governments who want to
move towards a better state than they are now in the context of DG. Practitioners and policymakers
can use these theoretical blocks and specific policy objectives under each phase to develop a policy
audit checklist or maybe as a check right from the beginning of policy deliberations and development to ensure achievement of the outcome of DCE.
When seen in the light of theoretical discipline they are drawing from, these objectives can also
provide an idea of the type of human resource and academic or policy experts we might need to
operationalize these objectives for achieving the overall goal of DCE. Along with this, the model
can also help outline the need for specific technology infrastructure required at different stages
to complete DCE. The infrastructure needed at different phases would be different. As for MCSD,
it might need a service delivery network that will most probably be a one-way communication in
essence. Such an infrastructure would be obsolete and limiting for other strategies like PB or DG
as we need platform technologies there, which incorporate feedback and facilitate fully fledged dialogues and deliberations between different stakeholders in the governance process.

9. Conclusion
The area of Digital Citizen Empowerment explores how digital technologies could be leveraged to
strengthen the core of the anthropocentric structure of a democratic government. Empowering citizens is the key to changing their state from mere consumers of DG services to prosumers, collaborators, and solution innovators who can partner with policymakers to deliver improved policy
outcomes. It is crucial that participation from the citizens is voluntary and never mandated for the
development of a democratic e-government ecosystem that is sustainable and works as a self-generating knowledge network. Transparency, awareness, and accountability are seen as solutions for
this problem. Also, having more participation is just one part of the solution, but the complete
goal is also dependent on the quality of participation.
Our study uncovered four distinct strategic streams used to engage citizens using ICTs: MCSD, PB,
DG and DA. We further discussed these strategies in the light of citizen power and ICT frameworks.
We concluded that governments and civic bodies should strive for a balance between social and
state accountability to fill in the gaps left by older models of democratic governance. We were
able to synthesize and present the different promoting and obstructing factors of these strategies
and incorporated them into the conceptual framework of DCE. This conceptual model proposed
by us outlines specific research and policy points based on different strategic themes and theoretical
foundations for achieving stagewise development of empowering processes leading to the establishment of the information societies of the future.

10. Limitations and future research
We would like to acknowledge some limitations in undertaking this study, and the first one would be
our inclusion of studies only from the Scopus and WoS platforms. The search string used by us might