ICT, citizen engagement and the governance of extractive resources in Tanzania: Documenting the practice and challenges

Abstract

Citizen engagement is one way of improving the governance of extractive resources and overcoming the resource curse. Academic research on Tanzania's extractive resource governance has shown that meaningful offline citizen engagement remains a troubling area mainly because of how it is framed by the government and the measures it takes to suppress organised community initiatives for engagement. Can government use of ICT promote citizen engagement? This paper asks one major question: how do governments deploy ICTs to create and/or constrain opportunities for active citizen engagement in extractives decision-making and governance processes? In answering this question, the paper examines how the Tanzanian government uses ICTs to engage with citizens in extractives decision-making and governance processes and whether this engagement really empowers citizens to influence resource governance decisions. The paper shows that much as the government uses ICT to inform the public about extractives development, it equally takes measures-political and legal- to ensure that meaningful citizen engagement does not evolve. This calls for a nuanced analysis of the potential role of ICT in promoting citizen engagement in governance processes.