Digital Governance and E-Government Principles

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the capacity of digital governance to address key aspects of reform of traditional procurement, the growing complexity of government, and the governance challenges of many developing countries. The chapter reviews the problems of traditional procurement, the distinction between simple versus complex procurement, and new modalities, and notes that the prevailing procurement model has been built on a framework designed for simple and manual procurement. Modernization efforts to address these issues have often been scoped around the robust governance institutions of advanced economies and are not good matches to the very different realities in many middle income and emerging economies. The chapter discusses how e-Government principles applied in e-procurement can play a critical role in resolving some of the challenges in public procurement.