Technicalities: E-Government for E-Europe
With their sights set on EU accession, countries across the region have high ambitions for e-government. Unfortunately, they are missing much bigger problems at ground level.
Among the many commitments made by would-be members of the EU is the creation of e-government systems. In November 2001, nine applicants declared their intention to help build up systems that will one day be merged into a European Internet portal accessible to all citizens of Europe and containing basic public services, like tax payments and ID document application procedures.
No date was set, no strictures imposed, and 10 months on, the prospect of public services offered to citizens and companies through an electronic medium, 24 hours a day, seven days a week remains very distant in countries along the periphery of the EU.
Still, in post-communist countries where good governance is in short supply and long queues and complex paperwork are the norm, government websites at least offer hope for a simpler, speedier journey through the maze of bureaucracy.
How far has the project progressed, and how much simpler or speedier have government websites made life? Unfortunately, it's hard to say. The EU has not produced statistics, and any attempts at a full, independent account would have to consider a wide range of issues. As the EU project says, a developed system of e-government has to consider "interactions" between the government and the citizen (G2C), between the government and the business community (G2B), between the government and public authorities (G2E), and between the government and government institutions (G2G). For each interaction, the EU has set up a code of practice, the implementation of which entails a number of intermediary steps: Current laws need to be amended, new regulations introduced, staff trained, and money invested.
Be that as it may, a study done in April 2002 by the UN Thessaloniki Center for Public Service Professionalism (UNTC) does give at least some sense of how wired governments across the region are. Some of the figures look good. Every ministry in Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, and Latvia can boast a website. The figures fall to 71 percent in Serbia and Montenegro, 62.5 percent in Romania, and 59 percent in Albania, but these are still reasonable figures.
However, when we leap from national to local authorities, the data paints a totally different picture. The country with the highest level of local authorities websites is Slovenia, with 70 percent, but the figures plunge when it comes, for example, to Hungary (21 percent), the Czech Republic (13 percent), and Slovakia and Romania (both 9 percent).
And when we consider the number of national government sites that are interactive, the picture is completely different once again. For those who want their governments to provide not just biographies of ministers, but also (for example) discussion forums, e-mail addresses, or a personalized portal, the best governments are (or, at least the UNTC suggests) Armenia, with 10 interactive websites, Romania with nine, and Azerbaijan with seven. According to the UNTC, none of the other countries surveyed has even one interactive website.
These are findings that probably bear little relation to reality. As a Romanian, I wouldn't mind knowing what those nine interactive websites are. The government is certainly not helping me to find out--I haven't received any printed flyers in my mailbox. I suspect these figures were simply reported by Romanian officials and reflect plans rather than achievements. The same UNTC study says that a major problem of transitional countries is the low level of administrative transparency. Reporting false data will surely not solve that problem.
However, why such a b ig discrepancy between national and local administrations? The first explanation that springs to mind is the amount of bureaucracy at the local level. At the national level, the obligation to create at least a semblance of e-government for the EU ensures that some red tape is cut through. But in the regions, it is extremely difficult to compel bureaucrats who work in organizations still hooked to the paper world, and where power is shared by many levels of management, to simplify access to information and reduce paperwork.
Nor is it simply a matter of technophobia or a lack of obligation and conviction. People in their 50s who lived and worked under the Communist regime will reject the notion of offering transparent public services electronically for fear that technology will make them obsolete--and also because new, automated processes will mean fewer opportunities to demand bribes. In such circumstances, training staff is only a small part of the battle.
The battle is not going well in Romania. By law, all local authorities should have a system in place by the end of 2002 that would allow citizens to pay their local taxes online. Since only one of Bucharest's six districts is even testing a payment system, the prospects look miserable.
And even if, miraculously, all Romanians could theoretically pay their taxes online next year, how many would? Internet penetration rate is low and it is hard to believe that older, poorly educated citizens will go into cyber cafes to access governmental portals. And with incomes so low in Romania and elsewhere in the region, it is hard to imagine that the many who avoid paying taxes the traditional way would be more willing to do so electronically.
What is certain is that governments will need to launch proper promotional campaigns and offer some system of training. Without that, it is hard to believe that many people will adopt a new system.
E-government was never going to be an easy project. Across the EU, governments are still trying to pass laws and create platforms and portals, and the task faced east of Berlin is harder still. In this context, Romania's improvement of existing legislation and adoption of new regulations and its pipeline project to create an e-government portal rate as big progress.
But does the EU's "to do" list include the need to tackle the problems of low Internet penetration, the rejection of the new system by bureaucrats and the man on the street, and the importance of marketing? In an attempt to bring entry to the EU closer, would-be members are hiding the real problems behind new ones. And until the basic problems are tackled, the notion of e-government will, in countries like Romania, seem like offering an expensive car to a homeless person.
George Popescu is an assistant lecturer at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication Studies in Bucharest.
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