Towards achieving participation equilibrium in information and communication technology for development (ICT4D) projects: a human action perspective

© 2015 Dr. Arthur Glenn MaailRealising the benefits offered by information and communication technologies (ICTs), governments and donor agencies spend millions of dollars annually to establish ICT projects aiming to improve livelihood of rural and disadvantaged community all around the world. Such projects are known as Information and Communication Technology for Development (ICT4D) projects. However, many of these projects failed to achieve their objectives, which may deter future efforts and donor agencies to support such important development initiatives. Researchers and practitioners have argued about the importance of participation from the target users (i.e. community) in the development of ICT4D projects as a way to improve the success of these initiatives. Nonetheless, the success of ICT4D projects does not always correlate to the higher degree of user participation. Instead, this thesis points to the importance of achieving user participation equilibrium and understanding the two competing groups that affect the balance of the equilibrium. Those two competing groups are, on one side, the conditional factors, which determine the actual degree of user participation and, on the other side, the approach adopted in project development, which implies the desired degree of participation. Prior studies have shown that when user participation equilibrium is achieved, that is when the desired degree matches with the actual degree of user participation, user participation would have a positive correlation with success of the project. This thesis proposes a new framework, which categorises the conditional factors affecting user participation in ICT4D projects based on the typology of human actions offered by the Habermas’ theory of communicative action (TCA). The framework is then validated using two research methods: a multiple case study method involving nine organisations called “telecentre” and an asynchronous online focus group (AOFG) method with fourteen ICT4D practitioners. By incorporating a typology of human action, this research has extended the existing knowledge in managing user participation in ICT4D projects. First, the thesis shows the applicability of human action perspective in understanding the conditional factors affecting user participation in the development of ICT4D projects. Second, the thesis also highlights the role of intermediated interaction with technology towards achieving participation equilibrium. Third, the thesis shows the importance of managing social interactions between users and other project stakeholders as the key to achieve participation equilibrium. Finally, the proposed framework lays out the common properties of the sets of conditional factors for each approach used in the development of ICT4D projects. Understanding offered by the proposed framework helps practitioners to focus on a specific set of conditional factors and devise appropriate strategies in managing user participation for a given project based on the approach employed. The framework can also be used as a guide to suggest the most appropriate approach in the development of ICT4D projects given specific resources and conditions