Voice or Chatter? Making ICTs Work for Transformative Citizen Engagement
The synthesis report of this multi-country research study explores how ICT-mediated citizen engagement can promote democratic governance and amplify citizens’ voices. Digital choices for democracy can empower or disempower citizens; they can present citizens with real alternatives for equality, thereby deepening democracy, or prove costly for both individual citizens and the polity as a whole.Carried out by IT for Change, the study adopted a comparative case study methodology, building its analysis on empirical explorations of ICT-mediated initiatives in eight countries. In each country, a specific digital citizen engagement initiative was selected as an aid to understanding the historical evolution and particular institutional context of e-participation, through the interplay between structures of governance and citizen agency.
