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E-Government (EGOV) can be defined as the use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) by governments to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of public service delivery to citizens and businesses (Srivastava, Teo, & Devaraj, 2016). The promise of EGOV in streamlining public service delivery and strengthening government-citizen relationship has already inspired its near-global implementation. While substantiating this recent surge in global EGOV adoption, existing EGOV literature recounts a rich inventory of positive impacts, including higher economic prosperity (Krishnan, Teo, & Lim, 2013) and enhanced public governance (O’Neill, 2009). Among such “technology utopian” narratives, leading scholars continue to highlight some of the harsh realities that often get lost within these predominantly optimistic accounts (Choi & Chandler, 2020). For instance, evidence of EGOV failures abound in extant literature (Dada, 2006; Heeks, 2002). In fact, EGOV failures are quite alarming with almost 85% of EGOV initiatives often unable to achieve their objectives (Anthopoulos, Reddick, Giannakidou, & Mavridis, 2016). While a myriad of reasons have been attributed for these EGOV failures, prior works highlight the design-reality gap as a major cause (Anthopoulos et al., 2016; Gil-García & Pardo, 2005). The design-reality gap could be partly attributed to the modernization perspectives that dominated much of initial EGOV implementations, where a narrow conception of development incited the mere replication of EGOV initiatives from developed economies to developing countries often leading to catastrophic failures. In this vein, Heeks & Molla (2009), while emphasizing the importance of the social context in EGOV design and implementation (Heeks, 2006), proposes a “context aware” EGOV strategy as the main guiding cornerstone for the ICT4D 2.0 initiative (Heeks, 2009), which espouses closer adherence to ground realities and country-specific needs. Invariably, this emerging stream of ICT4D literature asserts the importance of country heterogeneities in the design, implementation, and impact of EGOV. Given an apparent lack of studies explicating country heterogeneities in extant EGOV literature, our study seeks to contribute to this stream of literature by helping uncover country heterogeneities based on variations in EGOV development over time. Such an undertaking assumes importance as it helps extract more context-aware policy directions as opposed to a “one-size-fits-all” approach (Currie & Seddon, 2014).
On this note, the few existing works exploring these heterogeneities are limited to single year or averaged time-period investigations, thereby being limited to a time-static approach (Cruz-jesus, Oliveira, & Bacao, 2012). While understanding time-static heterogeneities assumes great importance, undertaking temporal investigations would complement existing studies in explicating the dynamic nature of country heterogeneities across time. Specifically, this would help us gain an understanding of country heterogeneities in terms of their EGOV growth. Understanding the EGOV growth patterns of countries provides more context and dimensions to our EGOV know-how as it informs us regarding where EGOV in a particular country is heading. Additionally. it also contributes towards a more nuanced country-level peer comparison. Towards this, our paper attempts to highlight these EGOV heterogeneities by tracing the EGOV evolution of countries from 2008 to 2018 and identifying clusters of countries that exhibit similar behaviour in their EGOV growth across time. Accordingly, we explore the following research question (RQ) as part of this study.
Subsequently, given the normative objectives of countries in furthering their development and sustainability agenda, we extend the scope of this study to additionally explore the variations in the contribution of EGOV towards this global agenda across the identified country-cohorts. Towards this, we explore the following research question too.