E-Participation: an investigation of Government Readiness in the Kingdom of Bahrain

Abstract

Nowadays, governments around the world started recognizing the importance of involving citizens in decision process making through what is called e-Participation. E-Participation is the use of Technology to enhance involving citizens in decision making in order to increase transparency and enhance communication between governments and citizens. E- Participation by its real mean is now applied in the Kingdom of Bahrain. This research is to investigate the readiness of e-Participation implementation in the Kingdom. To achieve this aim, an e-Government Authority’s initiative that is responsible for the implementation of e- Participation in the Kingdom was evaluated using a framework from the literature. The results showed that the Kingdom of Bahrain is ready to implement e-Participation as there were good initiatives with relation to the ten dimensions of the framework considered in this research. This research provides the government of the Kingdom of Bahrain with insights on the dimensions and factors that are important to enhance the readiness of e-Participation implementation.