AN EXAMINATION OF E-GOVERNMENT IN THE DELIVERY OF PUBLIC SERVICES IN NIGERIA: A POLICY TRANSFER ANALYSIS

Abstract

Policy transfer has been the dominant approach by both local policy actors and international donors to domestic policy development in less developed countries across Africa. Key to this type of policy transfer is the adoption of New Public Management (NPM) reform ideas and e-government strategies. Many of the existing studies on policy transfer focus on transfer between developed countries, ignoring transfer activities across Africa. As a result, there is a lacuna in our existing knowledge on transfers across Africa, in the context of it being both a theoretically and empirically neglected area of study. Currently, the literature suggests that policy transfer across Africa a] originates from the global north and that pressures from international donors are the major causes of the transfer of e-government strategies in that continent and b] governments in Africa implement the transferred policies for fear of losing loans, and other forms of benefits that come as a condition for policy transfer. This study seeks to demonstrate that both international pressures and domestic factors are responsible for policy transfer in less developed countries across Africa, and not all transfers originated from the global north. In addition, the use of coercive modalities by donor organisations and countries to impose policy transfer on African governments may not necessarily lead to a successful transfer. This is the case because local factors such as economic conditions, infrastructural deficits, bureaucratic resistance and lack of sufficient political support not international pressures shape the outcomes of implementation of transfer across Africa. But donors in many cases have overlooked the domestic contextual factors, and only coerce political office holders to transfer without engaging other critical domestic policy actors before the transfer. Similarly, the extant literature on policy transfer also ignored the critical role of other domestic policy actors in shaping the outcomes of implementation of the transferred reform strategies across Africa. The research draws on two original empirical cases: the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) and the Nigerian Immigration Service (NIS) are used in this study to examine the dynamics of the transfer of e-government strategies to Nigeria. The study looks at the origin of the transfer, the causes of the transfer, the actors involved and the modalities used for the transfer of e-government to Nigeria. It examines the factors that determine the outcomes of implementation and the lessons learnt in the transfer of e-government reform strategies from the international arena to Nigeria. A framework which took account of multi-levels of policy transfer was used to study the dynamics of policy transfer at the international arena, national level and at the level of the implementing institutions. By using this approach, the study makes a range of both empirical and theoretical contributions to the debate on policy transfer in the context of Africa that have been ignored by the previous studies. It concludes that not all transfers across Africa originated from the global north. Both international pressures and domestic factors are culpable for policy transfer across LDCs and domestic factors not international pressures shape the outcomes of implementation of transfer in Africa.

Date of Award	1 Aug 2019
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	The University of Manchester
Supervisor	Liz Richardson (Supervisor) & David Richards (Supervisor)