E-Government Implementation in Developing Countries

Antoine Harfouche () and Alice Robbin ()
Additional contact information
Antoine Harfouche: Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense
Alice Robbin: Indiana University Bloomington

A chapter in From Information to Smart Society, 2015, pp 315-327 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract This paper presents preliminary results of an ongoing study of e-government implementation in Lebanon. Following suggestions by various scholars that students of e-government employ theory to strengthen our knowledge about ICT for development, we apply a neoinstitutional theoretical lens to understand the role of international donor agencies that led Lebanese public authorities, since 2000, to invest in e-services despite the country’s serious economic difficulties and heavy debt. We situate implementation of an e-government infrastructure in the context of external pressures that Lebanese public administrators confronted. This analysis is based on the triangulation of evidence from semi-structured interviews with senior officials in government agencies who led the implementation effort, official government documents, and newspaper reports on the progress of this project. We find that the response by Lebanese public officials can be explained by the three isomorphic processes of coercion, mimesis, and transmission of norms. This case study suggests that implementing e-administration by developing countries is not necessarily motivated by a search for efficiency; under certain conditions adoption results from external institutional pressures. Nonetheless, this implementation needs to be understood as only a very small part of a larger story of the history and politics of Lebanon that contributed to what has been called the “still born” implementation of e-government in Lebanon.

Keywords: European Union; Public Administration; United Nations Development Program; Coercive Isomorphism; Heavy Debt (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:lnichp:978-3-319-09450-2_26

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9783319094502

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-09450-2_26

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Lecture Notes in Information Systems and Organization from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().