The Challenge of Collaborative Government in Local Administration: A Romanian Case Study

Abstract

Without being an exhaustive description of the collaborative government, this paper examines the concept and uses its identified elements and attributes to sketch the subsequent e-government development starting from the present Romanian status. In our essay we identify three major assault directions: 1) establish the local administration presence on-line by means of a single Web portal, 2) offer the main programmes and services on-line, and 3) integrate service delivery among the different levels of government.In order to move toward the collaborative approach, the e-government previous stages should be completed. Using the classical literature references, we evaluate the Timis County e-government position and its potential in implementing collaborative government. We describe the results of the content and functional investigation for the most representative local authorities: the City Hall of Timisoara and the County Council of Timis.The study conclusions establish a valuable foundation for us in our following research intention. Our research programme will determine that collaborative government is a new approach to work out the problems facing the Romanian society by bringing together the strengths of various players (academic researchers, local administration and ICT companies) in a cooperative effort, in order to bring e-performance to local administration of the Timis County.