Journal of Public Policy

The extent to which e-governance develops in a country is a function of the collective national and local capital supplying IT services and of informal social and human capital creating a demand for e-governance. Supply requires public officials and citizens to have access to the Internet and access varies enormously according to a country's modern resources and political openness. But the characterization of these differences as a digital divide is misleadingly static. A diffusion model of Internet access shows that it is more realistic to think of cross-national differences in terms of leading and lagging countries; in this model laggards have the potential to catch up with leaders. Differences in the capacity of countries to supply standard e-government services are a consequence of its degree of modern resources and to supply e-participation facilities reflects its political openness and extent of corruption. In countries with a high degree of modern resources and a majority of adults on line, digital choice creates limits as well as opportunities for e-governance, since most non-users of the Internet are older people who see no need for going on line. Among those on line a majority prefer to contact local and central government by traditional means, such as telephone or writing a letter. In the most modern and open societies the diffusion of the Internet is most likely to promote government efficiency and the virtual linkage of disparate public agencies serving the same client. In developing countries it will be one more pressure to reduce corruption and increase bureaucratization and in relatively closed regimes it can threaten destabilization by strengthening dissident mobilization within and across national borders. Globally, the diffusion process will promote openness in ‘intermestic’ public policies that involve both national and trans-national politics. It will also reduce the proportion of native English-speakers and increase bilingual and bicultural Internet users.

To analyse convergence and divergence in Natural Resource New Governance Arrangements (NRNGAs) two regimes in the environmentally-related areas of forest and fisheries management are examined. The findings reveal limited convergence across sectors and countries in the general aims and ideas behind NGAs and evidence of significant policy divergence in the tools and mechanisms created for their implementation. The reasons for the differences lie primarily in the policy formulation process. While the impetus for the adoption of both NRNGAs is in the international and regional realms, without the force of either international law or competitive advantage, pressure for convergence is weak. Aspects of the policy formulation process, especially the manner in which the changing capacities of domestic public and private actors active in the affected resource policy arena interact to influence policy design, are critical for explaining policy convergence and divergence. Specifically, the interplay between the effect of the internationalization of resource policy issues, tending to increase private capacities at the expense of the public one, and the declining importance of primary industries, which has the reverse effect, is shown to have played an important role in NRNGA policy dynamics.