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S. SHARMA ET AL.

public sphere. This can allow citizens to exercise rights and forge bonds of solidarity with other citizens. Pandey and Gupta (2018) tried to establish and validate the relationship between ICT and
developmental initiatives taken by governments employing a comprehensive evaluation framework
focusing on different types of impacts created by such initiatives.
Recently, scholars have explored the possibility of DCE by changing the pre-existing power
relations in the society with the help of strategically aligned public-value delivery using ICT (Mali
& Gil-Garcia, 2017; Li et al., 2020). Scholars suggest that ICTs based value co-creation in e-governance,
improvement in overall quality of service, feeling of accountability, and openness can improve citizens’ trust and adoption of digital participation mechanisms (Chohan & Hu, 2020b; Hu et al., 2019).
However, DCE can be sustainable only if initiatives can achieve long-term ICT engagement with the
citizens. In some cases, short-term engagement could also improve citizens’ feeling of empowerment if their interests are accounted for with immediate gratification in the form of incentives
and feedback (De Mesquita et al., 2018; Gün et al., 2020; Mohamudally & Armoogum, 2019). The
relationship between sustainable development goals (SDGs) given by the UN and the usage of
ICT to achieve them is also explored in the literature. Researchers call for a conscious effort by
policy practitioners and designers employing the idea of policy-coherent sustainable development
(PCSD) (Rothe, 2020; Sánchez-Tortolero et al., 2019). We find a new conceptualization of the ICT4D
field with contemporary issues, discussing ways to improve citizen e-participation in governance
(Heeks, 2020b, 2020a). The growing role of social media in organizing collective action and participatory monitoring for evaluating local initiatives can help make DCE socially sustainable and more
effective (Cieslik et al., 2021; Kibukho, 2021; Ye et al., 2021). Across all these deliberations in the
research body, it is also established that governments cannot achieve sustainable DCE without
improving individual capabilities. Only this can promote the feeling of voluntary participation and
ownership over initiatives to tackle local issues (Hoque, 2020; Vaidya & Myers, 2021; van Biljon,
2020), and this forms our core motivation for taking up this study.

3. Selection of literature
To study the evolution of DCE literature, we chose the Scopus and Web of Science (WoS) databases.
These are two of the most extensive repositories for research literature, allowing users to search and
filter papers covering different fields of study. This is particularly useful as we expect the concerned
literature for our review will be touching many areas of research and application. As a methodology,
we followed the systematic literature review process as depicted in Figure 1 (Chauhan et al., 2016;
Gupta et al., 2018; Kapoor et al., 2014; Williams et al., 2015).
A keyword search was conducted on these databases using three keywords: ‘Digital Citizen
Empowerment’, ‘Digital Empowerment’ and ‘Citizen Empowerment’ with OR operator in ‘Articletitle, keywords or Abstracts’ field, which resulted in a total of 656 results. De-duplication was
done before moving ahead, which left us with 520 unique articles. To ensure a better quality of
peer-reviewed literature, the studies were restricted to journal articles, resulting in 302 documents.
In the next phase, fields of study were restricted only to ‘Social-studies, Computer Science or Management’ to keep the search relevant to the context of this study, leaving 210 documents to cover.
Based on the reading of abstracts, we shortlisted 114 articles for in-depth reading. All this filtering
was done by 15th April 2021. After reading these filtered papers in depth, we selected 72 documents
for the review (the complete list of selected studies is available in the Appendix).

4. Literature analysis
The search resulted in a pool of literature distributed over two decades, of which more than 50% has
been published in the last five years. The studies overlapped with a few other research fields, namely:
Computer Science; Arts and Humanities; Business, Management, and Accounting; Economics,