The politics of implementing e-government for development: the ecology of games shaping property tax administration in Bangalore city, India

The recent global diffusion of information and communications technologies (ICTs) has raised expectations for technological change to support socio-economic progress and political reform in the developing as well as the developed world. Particularly prominent is the promise of ICT platforms and applications that enable innovations in electronic government (e-government), since their implementation and use in the public sector are often linked to organizational and administrative reforms. Much has been written about e-government within a growing stream of literature on ICT for development, generating countervailing perspectives where optimistic, technocratic approaches are countered by far more sceptical standpoints on technological innovation. This body of work is not without its limitations: a large proportion has been anecdotal in its style and overly deterministic in its logic, with far less being empirical, and there is a tendency for models offered up by scholarly research to neglect the actual attitudes, choices and behaviour of the wide array of actors involved in the implementation and use of new technology in real organisations. To address these shortcomings, this research sought to focus on an empirical case study surrounding the implementation and use of an electronic property tax collection system in Bangalore, India between 1998 and 2008. Early work reinforced the need to move beyond technologically deterministic explanations of the project, prompting the study to draw on the theoretical perspective of the 'Ecology of Games' which (being close to theories of New Institutionalism) recognises the importance of a multitude of diverse motives and individualistic behaviour as key factors influencing organisational reform and institutional change. This thesis thus contributes not just to an understanding of the role of ICTs in administrative reform in development, but towards an emerging body of research that is critical of managerial rationalism for an organization as a whole, and sensitive to an ecology of actors and motivations within the organisation. The core research findings of the work question the received wisdom prevalent in current political and development discourse that all actors on such projects, operating within a given game arena or game ecology possess a global, rational perspective on the role of technology, both in government and within their particular domain specialism; suggesting that both scholars of e-government and top management would do well to recognise and seek to understand the complex web of varying actor interests and motivations inherent within ICT-fordevelopment projects.