Should we still be doing ICT4D research?

Abstract

AbstractIn over 30 years of history, the field of Information and Communication Technology for Development (ICT4D) has asserted itself both within Information Systems (IS) and across disciplines. However, the core assumptions on which the field was built have been questioned over time, resulting in a situation in which such assumptions—on development, the role of ICTs towards it, and the meaningfulness of the term “developing countries”—have been problematized. As a result, this paper poses the question on whether it still makes sense to do ICT4D research: starting from older ICT4D landscape papers, it fleshes out three main assumptions made at the origins of the field. It then problematizes such assumptions through more recent works, noting that the old theoretical grounds of the field do not apply anymore today. Having said that, it states three reasons for renewed ICT4D research efforts: the reframing of “development” in terms of justice, the potential of multitheoretical research approaches, and the turn to indigenous understandings of ICTs. For all these reasons, it concludes that doing ICT4D research is especially important today, in virtue of a juncture of history that problematizes its older assumptions.