Political Context and the Adoption of ICT: Measuring (the Absence of) E-governance in Hong Kong

This article examines the concept of e-governance by conducting an empirical study of Hong Kong, one of the highly-ranked global performers in e-government. E-governance, as a more advanced stage of e-government, places a strong emphasis on public participation. While ICT is heavily adopted for other functions of e-government in Hong Kong, there is little adoption in the purpose of e-governance. The study findings on Hong Kong show, due to the influence of political context, governments in a non-democratic setting can focus mainly on efficiency purposes in developing e-government without enhancing public participation - the essence of e-governance. This leads to the more fundamental and important questions on the limit of impact of ICT on institutional change in the public sector and whether a natural evolution from e-government to e-governance does exist.