E-government implementation in developing countries a neoinstitutional approach to explain failure

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.