Book review: e-governance for development: a focus on rural India, Shirin Madon

The concept of e-governance indicates, in the powerful synthesis provided by Heeks (2001), "the ICT-enabled route to good governance": it refers, indeed, to the wide system of solutions for public administration that are based on the toolkits of digital technology. As it emerges from an important problematization operated by Unsworth (2005), the idea of "good governance" does not merely coincide with the maximization of public cost efficiency; instead, it can be identified with the achievement of a complicated balance, between state effectiveness in control and policymaking and downward accountability of the state to its citizens. On the one hand, in those nations where economic efficiency constitutes the main objective of public management, e-governance tends to be seen primarily as a means to speed up the mechanisms of bureaucracy. Yet, when we shift the focus on countries that suffer from institutional frailty, the dimension of accountability, and of the transparent functioning of public administration, necessarily emerges as a primary objective of any intervention within the sphere of government.