Developmental Aspirations and Networked Readiness
The world is a network of wires for most of us in the universities and policy sciences. Development has become data based made available through these many networks. The challenge of development is about managing networks which has also been one of the MD
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Developmental Aspirations and Networked Readiness
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The Challenge of Development in a Networked World
Development in a networked world has a much wider connotation. While there are varieties of participants representing different cultural and behavioural perceptions, there are also many platforms raising demands, mobilising opinion, generating critiques of policies and competing to be heard. There are various possibilities and opportunities which governments and citizens can utilise and learn from and develop abilities to enlarge the scale and proportion of their activities without impinging additional burden of cost and time on participation and implementation. In a world full of information and alternatives, no government can deny the need for networking nor can citizens escape being part of at least some of these networks. While the second chapter established the necessity for formulating e-governance policies with a critical insight on state power and the likely impact upon citizen’s lives, freedom and privacy, the present chapter would highlight the need for revisiting the linear implementation designs of developmental policies and programmes to a more meandering, warped and sometimes entwined process in which contingencies and exigencies can make impactful changes in policies while they are implemented. While this needs knowledge-based governance, it also requires skill, technology and connectivity for preventing the society from splitting into counterproductive digital divides. Development and ICTs are related and nothing proves it better than the rising GDP of countries as the score on ‘Networked Readiness Index’ (NRI) goes up. NRI is propensity of countries to exploit opportunities for bringing development. ICT makes it easier to achieve the targets and the goals by transcending many traditional handicaps of geography, bureaucratic behaviour, human error and institutional designs. As the year of MDG deadline of 2015 draws to a close, nations are fervently gyrating to explore, invent and discover strategies, innovations and shortcuts to achieve the committed targets. Many data management and survey companies across the world are becoming active on identifying and selecting indices and policy categories for ranking countries in some of the key areas of governance and A. Singh, A Critical Impulse to e-Governance in the Asia Pacific, DOI 10.1007/978-81-322-1632-2_3, © Springer India 2013
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Developmental Aspirations and Networked Readiness
well-being. This has become a key concern for the country since any slackness would make them lose business and investments and threaten their political prospects. In September 2000, the 189 member states of the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Millennium Declaration which is currently setting the pace and direction of all developmental work going around the world. The eight goals of the declaration referred to as MDG confirmed ‘…to making the right to development a reality for everyone and to freeing the entire human race from want…’ (UNO 2000, p.
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