E-government in New Zealand: Local Governments, Digital Divides and the National Digital Strategy

Abstract

Research carried out in 2009 on New Zealand's local government e-readiness with respect to the national digital strategy has discovered that there is a wide maturity range. In the first part of this chapter, an e-readiness maturity model is presented that indicates to what extent local governments, both urban and rural have met the national strategy guidelines. These results are contextualised within the international literature on local e-government maturity. In the second part of this chapter, challenges for four diverse and marginalised user groups are considered. Factors that affect end-users in New Zealand include: inequitable infrastructure provision, a shift in emphasis and ownership of technical knowledge and skills required to gain access to government services, and the differences in benefits and challenges for both majority and minority end-user groups. This analysis has been embedded in a theoretical framework informed by social informatics (Sawyer, 2005), digital inclusion/exclusion models (Cushman & McLean, 2008), boundary conditioning modelling (Cordoba & Midgley, 2008) and an e-government to e-governance model proposed by Dawes (2008).