Dimensions of scenario
Disruptive environment
Distrust in government
Government focus on inclusive services
Short abstract
In a highly polarized world, governments focus on key state tasks. The socio-economic policy is aimed at individuals taking their own responsibility, a mentality that rests on great support in 2020's society.
The scenario characteristics in brief
| Contextual environment | Government | ICT |
|
Resource wars Rapide growth of the world economy Critical international relationships Security vs. privacy Mobility and welfare Social Divide |
All inclusive service provision Increasing participation (policy formulation) |
Extension of technology and information infrastructure Transparency New, innovative participation mechanism Global and local standards Open-Source are less deployed because of robust quality of proprietary software |
The scenario characteristics in detail
Contextual environment
The big tensions in today's world are caused by quarrels and fights over resources. With the fast depletion of fossil fuels during the last century, its reserves have declined. At the same time, the world economy has shown a rapid growth, especially in Asia and Latin America, resulting to an energy demand that has never been so high. Also, the first serious political problems in international relations have been expressed around the supply of fresh water. These fights are sometimes being amplified by existing religious tensions between the more Islamic and the more Christian parts of the world. Citizen's main expectation of government is that it provides security, and they are willing to sacrifice worries around privacy for that. Terrorist attacks are frequent, but still leave huge scarves on society. The attacks have become more sophisticated and now are mainly aimed at disrupting critical infrastructures. To find a sense of safety, people more and more stick to (local) communities, from which they derive an identity in the rapidly changing world. The increase of the power of communities is also caused by massive immigration streams, needed to account for a lack of domestic labor within the union.
Governments and their stakeholders
The bad security situation between regional power blocks in the world is mirrored within the European Union. There, mobility and prosperity have grown. However, this has only come at the expense of equality of incomes and chances in the union. High-educated people are a big leap ahead on their lower-educated peers. On their turn, the working generations are politically dominated by the elder generations. The internal economy of the union is quite adaptive, in part caused by government's lesser interference with economic issues in society, which leaves more room for market parties to react quickly on changed circumstances.
When it comes to the provision of electronic services, government only undertakes limited steps. As it has left many services formerly thought of as being public to the market, it is not involved in the provision of most of them. The key state tasks, in contrast, are extensively supported by means of ICT. Here, technology is mainly used to cut costs and increase efficiency. The user perspective has got lost; most services are aimed at the middle man, who has an average ICT knowledge. This way of using ICT means that for exceptional cases, or for issues around people who do not master the use of ICT, a physical channel still is being kept in place.
Now that the economy relies for such a great deal on ICT, and most (successful) citizens have good ICT skills ? independent of their age ? the technology and information infrastructure is increasingly being used as a way to increase the participation in decision-making around public affairs. Independent citizens ask for transparency, and use this information to tightly control government when it comes to decisions that are in their own interest. New, innovative participation mechanisms are being used, among which are online opinion exchanges, which are enriched with simulation and gaming capabilities, so as to model strategic behavior of many sorts of actors before implementing new policies. The ubiquitous possibilities to influence government?s decision-making has given rise to a high level of trust. Another motivation for this confidence is the before-mentioned withdrawal of government's involvement with many societal issues, which means that government is quite well able to deliver up to the realistic demands from citizens.
The deployment of ICT for public value creation leads to highly intelligent and personalized services, as well as to transparent decision-making processes. Furthermore, ICT promotes participation through online consultation and decision-making systems, as well as data collection and data mining systems deliver high quality and opinion poll data to politicians for supporting their decision-making.
Technology
On the technological side, the increased competition between regional power blocks has resulted in a fading out of global standards. ICT standards nowadays come from economic bodies like the federal US state, the European Union and an economic and technological cooperation union of Asian tigers. It is believed that regional standards are a way of protectionism and that the respective markets are big enough to reach critical mass. More protectionism is also visible when it comes to software. The open source movement has been banned to history text-books, while they have not been able to deliver robust quality and innovativeness comparable to proprietary software suppliers.
