Trust and e-Government Projects – An Exploratory Study

Abstract

Trust forms an important part of the discourse on e-Government. E-Government adoption involves trust relationships amongst three important entities: government, citizens and the enabling technology, forming a trust triad. An important link in this trust triad that has not been studied much in the literature on e-Government is the role of the trust reposed by the government in the citizens. This relationship has enormous potential to simplify the control mechanisms used in e-Government transactions. This in turn, significantly enhances citizens’ perceived usefulness of the system. Hence, trust in citizens by the government is expected to eventually lead to higher adoption of the concerned e-Government system. This paper seeks to explore the issue of government trust in citizens using the case study methodology. We identify potential causes of disruption of the government’s trust in citizens and mechanisms of production of trust in the same con-text. We emphasize the role of information processing capability in the production of the government’s trust in the citizens. Further, we demonstrate that production of trust results in an opportunity for trust-based governance leading to higher adoption of e-Government projects.