Journal of International Development

J. Int. Dev. 20, 821–835 (2008)

Published online in Wiley InterScience
(www.interscience.wiley.com) DOI: 10.1002/jid.1498

ICT AND DEVELOPMENT STUDIES:

TOWARDS DEVELOPMENT 2.0
MARK THOMPSON*
University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

Abstract: This paper calls for a more committed engagement between ICT practitioners and
the development community, and seeks to make two contributions. The first is to show how it
has never been more important, as the more mature discipline, for development studies to
critique the operation of developmental ICT at policy level, as well as to inform and educate
the increasing numbers of, usually foreign, ICT investors and practitioners who are involving
themselves in these emerging markets. The second contribution is a description of the
fundamental challenge that recent Web 2.0 models of networked social interaction are
increasingly likely to pose to more established approaches and debates within development
studies itself. Having outlined the challenge, the paper looks at how such thinking, conceived
as ‘Development 2.0’, may contribute to four of the most pressing current debates within
development studies today. Finally, the paper concludes with an acknowledgement of some of
the immediate constraints to the transformational potential of Development 2.0, and outlines
some work that will be required to develop these ideas further. Copyright # 2008 John Wiley
& Sons, Ltd.

Keywords: Development 2.0; Web 2.0; ICT

1 INTRODUCTION: ICT AND ‘DEVELOPMENT’ HAVE NEVER BEEN SO

MUTUALLY IMPORTANT

1.1 Development Studies’ Challenge to ICT at Practice Level: Governance

and Sustainability

The theme of 2007’s DSA conference exemplified the unprecedented focus on the potential
of technology as a catalyst for economic and social development. This focus is mirrored by

*Correspondence to: Mark Thompson, Judge Business School, University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB2 1AG,
UK. E-mail: [email protected]

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822 M. Thompson

the increasing levels of interest being shown in information and communications

technologies (ICT) within the developmental context (World Bank, 2005), of which the
launch of the $100 laptop this summer was perhaps emblematic. ICT is seen, for example
as a crucial enabling infrastructure for future progress within four of Sen’s (1999, p. xii)
five developmental indicators: economic opportunities, political freedoms, social facilities
and transparency guarantees—and in the development of ‘knowledge societies’ as a key
accelerator for development (UNESCO, 2005). This increasing, global role of ICT as both
medium and platform for cultural and economic exchange brings a growing need for an
independent and informed policy level critique, of the way in which such technology is
planned and implemented within ‘developing’ country environments, where people are
often least positioned to complain when the benefits associated with ICT do not
materialise.
Such a policy-level critique is all the more important since, as with all forms of enabling
social infrastructure, ICT has the power to create new inequities, as well as exacerbate
existing ones, and as I have argued previously (Thompson, 2004), even to structure and
replicate marginality itself. This can occur both at the macro-level, by structurally
integrating communities into wider, uneven networks of capital, production, trade and
communication (Castells, 1997, 1998), as well as at the micro-level, where the frozen
discourse of software can ‘smuggle’ whole, possibly inappropriate value systems into new
environments (Danowitz et al., 1995).
As a discipline already familiar with issues attendant on introducing technologies into
new environments, there is therefore an important opportunity for the developmental
community to engage with and critique the operation of ICT within the developmental
context. This amounts to a willingness to ask often difficult questions about whether ICT
initiatives are actually increasing equitable access to the freedoms and life-chances that
form the basis of modern developmental initiatives—or whether they are merely creating
or exacerbating further inequality. For example, Roy (2005) points out that the flow of
foreign direct investment into India has not been substantial, in spite of the large
multinational presence in the subcontinent, and cites research showing a skewed
distribution of returns in favour of multinationals’ own home countries. Such observations
call for a longer term, more ‘structural’ analysis that looks beyond the tracking of
‘deliverables’ and short-term functional benefits so favoured by ICT projects, to include a
broader political economy of developmental ICT.
An example of a more structural critique of this kind is Wilson’s (2004) questioning of
automatic assumptions about the universal benefits associated with technology diffusion.
Instead, Wilson emphasises the need to view ‘developmental’ technology as deeply
embedded within social structures, suggesting that we think about a broader range of
factors affecting the diffusion of internet access that include, first, social, economic and
political structures; second, institutions; third, politics; and fourth, government policy
(including questions of public versus private ownership, market competition versus
monopoly, foreign versus domestic control and centralised versus decentralised structure).
In this example, ICT could benefit directly from such a ‘policy’ critique from the
development studies community, by including an analysis of these broader factors
within the business cases and investment appraisals of developmental ICT initiatives.
In this manner, demonstrating that such factors had been thought through sufficiently at
the policy and planning stage might become an important check on unqualified
‘technological optimism’, and a condition for the release of funding for developmental
ICT.

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1.2 Development Studies’ Challenge to ICT at Practice Level:

Governance and Sustainability

In particular, the marked growth in interest in ICT for development has resulted in an
unprecedented involvement in ‘developmental’ thinking and programmes by new, external
stakeholders from the ICT field, such as Cisco and Microsoft, who view their expansion
into emerging markets as of increasingly paramount importance for their future growth
(Hamm et al., 2004; IDG News Service, 2005). Although such new players undoubtedly
bring global resources and expertise to bear on development issues, they are likely to lack a
sustained historical engagement with the development studies literature in which
approaches to the use of ‘developmental’ technology are trialled and discussed. In contrast,
in highlighting that there are usually winners and losers when technology is introduced to a
developmental environment, development studies has succeeded in highlighting some
specific and complex contradictions with which ICT practitioners, no matter how
experienced, should engage. Two such examples are provided here.
The first is the mature literature surrounding the establishment and governance of
complex relationships involving conflicts of interests between donors, commercial
suppliers, NGOs, host governments and participant/recipients (e.g. Grimble and Wellard,
1997; Hemmati, 2002). As an area with heavy involvement from all of these stakeholders,
developmental ICT initiatives have a pressing need to manage conflicts of interest between
private gain and public good attendant upon all public infrastructure and service delivery
contracts—especially given the profit-centred business models of most ICT companies
(for an example of the ubiquity of these issues, see UK Parliamentary Office of Science and
Technology, 2003). Thus, there would appear to be a requirement for further work to relate
existing developmental governance literature to the struggle between competing interests
over who benefits from new investments in ICT infrastructures. This might include
struggles over the sorts of enabling information architectures to be developed (e.g. internet
exchange points,1 VoIP protocols),2 ISP ownership3 and the extent of privatisation and
liberalisation allowed, as well as the governance, models and commercial bases for
infrastructural delivery and support.
The second example of the need for the developmental ICT community to engage
closely with development studies literature stems from the growing pressure to apply
‘managerialist’, project-based paradigms that seek to transfer ‘best practice’ from
mainstream business into the developmental sector. This trend is exemplified by the New
Philanthropy movement, whose approach seeks to introduce the ‘know-how’ of business
and the best practices of management, marketing and strategic planning into the non-profit
arena (Alexeeva, 2007). With the call of such movements for the use of ‘hard’ (read
Western) management approaches and techniques, there is a fresh need to ensure that such
approaches do not result in any ‘new technocratic’ resurgence within developmental ICT.
Again, the appropriate technology movement within the development studies literature has

1
An Internet exchange point (IX or IXP) is a physical infrastructure that allows different Internet service providers
(ISPs) to exchange Internet traffic between their networks (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_exchange_
point).
2
Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is a telephony term for a set of facilities used to manage the delivery of voice
information over the Internet. VoIP involves sending voice information in digital form in discrete packets rather
than by using the traditional circuit-committed protocols of the public switched telephone network (http://
searchunifiedcommunications.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,sid186_gci214148,00.html#).
3
An Internet service provider (ISP) is a company that provides individuals and other companies’ access to the
Internet and other related services.

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824 M. Thompson

much to contribute to the ICT community in highlighting the importance of ensuring that
new technologies and working practices are culturally and environmentally relevant to
their intended users.
It is arguable that developmental ICT initiatives are no less subject to the requirement to
ensure sustainability than any other type of developmental initiative—and thus that ICT
practitioners should demonstrate familiarity with the considerable lessons learned in the
development literature about the limitations of ‘technocratic’ approaches when seeking to
implement sustainable technology.4 Such literature offers the ICT community valuable
insights that may strengthen the chances of technology being implemented in a culturally
literate and contextually sensitive manner.

1.3 Web 2.0: ICT’S Comprehensive Challenge to Development Studies

Development studies therefore has a pressing role to play at both policy and practice level
in critiquing and informing the operation of a relative newcomer to the developmental
field—a newcomer, moreover, that is increasingly private and external in origin (World
Bank, 2005, Guislain et al., 2006), and often steeped in western cultural values and
business practices. However, in addition to ICT’s ‘answerability’ to developmental
critique, the reverse now also applies: ‘development’ is increasingly answerable to newly
emerging models and debates that originate from within the ICT community, debates that
arguably are able to challenge the way in which development practitioners conceptualise
longer standing, more ‘internal’ discussions about the purpose and practice of
‘development’ itself. The remainder of this paper focuses on outlining and illustrating
the extent of this challenge.
The reason for ICT’s ‘challenge’ to existing ways of conceptualising development is that
despite the need, discussed above, for vigilance about the way in which the enabling power
of ICT is deployed, it is also striking that, once deployed, the use of ICT itself has never
been more open, democratic or collaborative for those lucky enough to gain access. This
shift is visible in both the enabling technical architectures (interoperability, open standards,
XML-based modular designs)5 as well as in the social behaviour that such architectures
allow (peer-to-peer collaboration, social networking sites such as My Space and Bebo,
volunteer-created sources of knowledge such as Wikipedia, alternative news services such
as the Korean Oh My News, with 55 000 citizen journalists, and trading systems such as
eBay, to include a small fraction). All these examples show clearly how such ideas have
been transforming social reality—enabled only by a relatively basic technical platform
that allows information to be shared in unprecedented ways. The link between ICT as
technical enabler (artifact) and the resulting social behaviours (ideas, ideologies) that are
thus facilitated has never been more marked, and the shift from some early conceptions of
ICT as top down, totalising instrument of efficiency and automation to the opposite view of
ICT as enabler of bottom-up collaboration, diversity and multiple truths is now readily
apparent.

4
For an exhaustive bibliography, see http://www.colby.edu/personal/t/thtieten/susdevgen.html
5
XML, or Extensible Markup Language, allows the sharing of structured data across previously incompatible
information systems, and is part of a broader movement towards more open sharing of data across increasingly
standardised informational and physical architectures.

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‘Web 2.0’ is perhaps the most definitive current expression of the open, collaborative
logic uniting the artifact—the networked logical and physical architecture of ICT6 —and
the network-enabled social expectations and behaviour that can result. The concept is
defined by Tim O’Reilly, who has been most instrumental in its articulation, as follows:
Web 2.0 is the network as platform, spanning all connected devices; Web 2.0
applications are those that make the most of the intrinsic advantages of that platform:
delivering software as a continually updated service that gets better the more people
use it, consuming and remixing data from multiple sources, including individual
users, while providing their own data and services in a form that allows remixing by
others, creating network effects through an ‘architecture of participation’, and going
beyond the page metaphor of Web 1.0 to deliver rich user experiences (O’Reilly,
2005).

The key insight here is that in its emerging Web 2.0 form, ICT can no longer be
conceived merely as assemblages of hardware, software and user behaviour: it is
increasingly a unity of artifact and idea within a single conceptual frame. Viewed instead as
an ‘architecture of participation’, ICT becomes an opportunity for generating, mediating
and moderating a particular conception of social life; which in turn poses a direct challenge
to much of the way in which ‘development’, with its associated visions for social life and
supporting infrastructure, has been conceptualised and delivered to date. As public goods
and services, developmental initiatives are arguably subject to modern, ICT-driven
critiques about the need for public service reform such as Leadbeater and Cottam’s The
User Generated State: Public Services 2.0 (2007), which calls for a shift from the focus on
‘delivery’ during the last 10 years (also seen in the developmental discourse) to a focus on
‘co-creation’. The authors demonstrate how citizens’ access to networked ICT has
generated new social expectations and behaviours, where people increasingly demand
involvement in their own governance and policy-making. They highlight successful
business models that:
enlist users as participants and producers at least some of the time: they move from
consuming content, watching and listening, to sharing, rating, ranking, amending,
adding. A public sector which just treats people as consumers—even well treated
ones—will miss this dimension of participation which is at the heart of the most
successful organisational models emerging from the interactive, two-way internet,
known as Web 2.0 (Leadbeater and Cottam, 2007).

My contention is therefore that the increasing ubiquity of ICT within development has
implications that extend even beyond its role as mediator of economic, social and political
opportunity. Conceived as ‘Web 2.0’, a paradigm for technology-enabled social life
comprising diversity, collaboration and multiple truths, ICT now poses a direct challenge to
development studies itself. With unprecedented funding going into the provision of ICT
artifacts within developmental contexts, in what ways will peoples’ increased use of these
artifacts, and participation in the networks that these enable, stimulate different social
6
A distinction is often made between the ‘logical’ architecture of ICT, which refers to software and data structures,
and the ‘physical’ architecture, which refers to hardware.

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behaviours and expectations? In what ways might Web 2.0 (conceived both as technology
and enabled behaviours) drive increasing calls for a much more plural and collaborative
‘Development 2.0’?
The next section represents an initial attempt to address this question, by discussing how
the increased use of ICT in developing countries, and the resulting opportunities for Web
2.0 behaviours amongst some of those ‘being developed’, may begin to inform some of the
current ‘point’ debates within development studies. In this view, Development 2.0 may
offer a new lens, or way of thinking, about developmental issues that takes explicit account
of the likelihood that, like those in more developed countries, a growing number of ICT-
enabled developees may start to demand increased participation in the planning and
execution of developmental initiatives undertaken on their behalf. Development 2.0 is not
offered as a new, alternative, ‘paradigm’ for development. Rather, it highlights the way in
which a particular, ICT-enabled mode of social behaviour may play an increasing part in
what Pieterse calls ‘reflexive development’, where in response to technological change,
‘development may become reflexive in a social and political sense, as a participatory,
popular reflexivity, which can take the form of broad social debates and fora on
development goals and methods’ (Pieterse, 1998, p. 369, original italics).
There are, of course, severe limitations to the number of people in developing countries
who are currently able to gain access to networked ICT and its associated transformatory
potential. However, in a world where increasing numbers of people live in cities offering
increased ICT infrastructure, the likelihood that this number will continue to grow steadily
would seem to make Development 2.0 a legitimate topic for discussion.

2 DEVELOPMENT 2.0

2.1 1950s–1990s; Parallel, but Limited Engagement Between

Development and ICT Literatures

Although an urgent need for committed interaction between development studies and ICT
disciplines may have arisen only recently, there are some interesting parallels in the way in
which the two have evolved. The 1950s–1970s were characterised, as described by Escobar
(1995, p. 45), by the ‘problematisation’ of development, and the resulting ‘solution’ of
professionalisation, that ‘refers mainly to the process that brings the Third World into
the politics of expert knowledge and Western science in general’ with a heavy emphasis
on the roles of capital and technology. Although part postcolonial reaction, such a
heavily technocratic worldview was surely part of the broader, ‘deus ex machina’
modernist faith in the enlightenment tradition where the machine is seen as the repository
of human reason (Grint and Woolgar, 1997), capable of improving the operation of
more fallible, less consistent human actors. Certainly early ICT implementations
were characterised by a sharp distinction between technology and human context,
between technical ‘experts’ and user-recipients, and a faith that Taylorian efficiencies
and improved behaviours might successfully be ‘designed in’ to organisational
environments.
The 1980s and 1990s saw some similar parallels between the developmental and
ICT disciplines. Perhaps the most marked is the participation movement, characterised
within development studies by Chambers’ prolific work (e.g. Chambers, 1997), and within
ICT by the Scandinavian approach to workshop-based participative user design and

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development that culminated in the now widespread Rapid Application Development

(RAD).7 Other parallels, however, include the increasing problematisation of development-
as-construction (e.g. Escobar, ibid., Gardner and Lewis, 1997) at the same time as the
explosion in challenges to essentialist conceptions of technology such as Social
Construction of Technology (e.g. Bijker, 1995), soft systems (e.g. Checkland, 1981), actor-
network theory (e.g. Latour, 1987) and interpretivism (e.g. Walsham, 1995). This last
movement, based on hermeneutics, recognises the limitations of the enquirer’s access to
others’ unique traditions of interpretation and consequent meanings, in a manner that finds
echoes in the often radical emphasis on cultural ownership and accessibility of
development’s New Social Movements (Touraine, 1981).
From the above, it appears that development studies and ICT therefore share some
striking commonality in terms of their historical evolution. However, I want to argue that
the ICT-enabled cluster of thought known as Web 2.0 has unprecedented implications for a
particular, plural, form of technology-enabled social life of pressing relevance to four key
current debates within development studies: participation, critical modernism, clinical
economics and new institutional theory. I address each of these areas in turn below.

2.2 How Web 2.0 can Contribute to Development’s Participation Debate

The participation approach has recently come under significant fire from several
development writers, most notably Cooke and Kothari (2001), who identify three sets of
‘tyrannies’ in the method: decision-making and control, in which they critique the role of
facilitators; tyranny of the group, in which they warn of the dangers of ‘groupthink’; and
tyranny of method, in which they highlight a tendency of participative approaches to
obscure other alternative viewpoints that might have emerged using other methods.
Further, significant criticisms have included participation’s tendency to privilege local
knowledge whilst ignoring macro-level power structures, and its simplistic view of the
operation of power, exemplified in particular by Chambers’ tendency to express power in
terms of binary oppositions (north/south, ‘uppers’/’lowers’, donors/recipients, creditors/
debtors, male/female, old/young, parent/child, manager/worker, patron/client, etc., Cooke
and Kothari, 2001, p. 176).
Interestingly, the key response to this criticism in the literature to date anticipates a key
feature of Web 2.0. Hickey and Mohan’s (2004) book Participation: from tyranny to
transformation is a collection of essays whose uniting theme is the reconceptualisation of
participation as a radicalised notion of citizenship involving a multi-scaled agency, or
engagement, that spans the various binary oppositions implied by earlier versions of
participation. This involves a more strategic, immanent focus on the achievement of a
gradual transformation of power relations between state and citizens, and upon enabling
the sorts of activities that are likely to bring such a transformation about.
Such a focus sits squarely within the conception of Web 2.0, addressed earlier, as an
‘architecture of participation’. Recalling O’Reilly’s earlier definition of Web 2.0 as ‘the
network as platform’, it is interesting to note that by definition a network has no centre.
Those included within such a network are therefore, by their very inclusion and
7
Rapid application development is an approach to developing software that seeks to ensure sustainability and
relevance to users by involving them in requirements gathering workshops, and building early prototypes in which
users test and ‘sign off’ small chunks of software in an iterative, interactive process.

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participation, challenging established channels of inclusion and participation—sublimat-

ing each of the above binary oppositions with which ‘participation’ has become associated
within the single logic of inclusion: you are either included in the network, or you are
not—whoever, and wherever, you are. By rendering participants’ identity and location less
relevant, this new logic of inclusion arguably redefines the entire social and physical
geography of which these oppositions were the previous contours.
An immanent, strategic model of development-as-citizenship would therefore appear to
call for enabling transformational mechanisms that are capable of bringing about the
required citizen participation in the first place. Greater access to ‘the network as platform’
would improve participation, addressing Cooke and Kothari’s three tyrannies: decision-
making and control, by eliminating facilitators; tyranny of the group, by eliminating the
dangers of face-to-face ‘groupthink’; and tyranny of method, by opening the network to the
plurality of all who happen to be included. Furthermore, such access addresses the major
criticism outlined above regarding participatory approaches’ simplistic conception of
power, by collapsing macro- and micro- in the instantiation of agency—participation in the
network—in a manner redolent of Giddens’ (1984) structuration theory. By replacing
binary notions of ‘powerful’ and ‘excluded’, with a single node, a networked model of
participation also encourages a more sophisticated view of capillary, circulating power
more akin to Foucault (1977), as well as enabling a new focus on the dynamics through
views are formed and sustained within networks of people that draws on the insights of
actor-network theory, where ‘powerful’ networks need continually to ‘enrol’ actors to
survive.

2.3 How Web 2.0 can Contribute to Development’s Critical Modernism Debate

A ‘Development 2.0’ view of participation therefore calls for a radically different

conception of agency that acknowledges the considerable power of ICT-enabled social
networks to transform the dynamics of group interaction. In similarly privileging the role of
networked human agency above the seeming ‘rationality’ of formal systems and structures,
the critical modernist view associated with Habermas reclaims the transformative
optimism of the enlightenment from postmodern disintegration—but places it under
continual probation. Gone are the certainties that characterised the modernist project and
the technocratic visions of development criticised by Escobar and others, to be replaced by
a call for a continual dialogue between multiple modernisms and rationalities in a manner
that allows for judgement between these, and for a resulting, qualified, impulsion towards
progress. This dynamic is also important to Hickey and Mohan’s vision of participation,
since such continual exchange, evaluation and refinement of ideas is the ‘motor’ through
which citizen engagement and subsequent structural transformation can be achieved.
Like participation, critical modernism also sits squarely within the conception of Web
2.0. Perhaps most prominent of all within the logic of Web 2.0 is the pragmatic approach to
experimentation that underlies critical modernism, of which the open source movement is a
good example. Open source software is a computer software which is freely available to
anyone who wants it and which anyone who so wishes can update and enhance—as long as
they share those enhancements for free with other users. Such software is therefore an
endless ‘beta version’, continually ‘on probation’ in the critical modernist sense, blind to
more formal systems and structures, and dependent on networked dialogue, as in the
O’Reilly definition. The conspicuous and growing success of the open source movement

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(visible, e.g. in the ubiquity of Linux software) demonstrates the ability of networked Web
2.0 social behaviour to continually improve and refine a central problematic using the very
diversity of its participants as its key asset. Developmentalists who espouse critical
modernist approaches to structural transformation must surely examine successful Web 2.0
models and ask how, and where, it might be possible and/or desirable to provide enabling
platforms for similar behaviour within the developmental context.

2.4 How Web 2.0 can Contribute to Development’s Clinical Economics Debate

In addition to facilitating the free exchange of ideas required for the development of civil
society and its associated transformative potential, Web 2.0 thinking is also of great
relevance to thought about ways of engendering and supporting new platforms for
transformative economic exchange at grass roots level. Coined by Sachs (2005, p. 145),
‘clinical economics’ is the claim that aid has an important role to play in development
through the establishment of structural linkages between health and infrastructure, which
will then help to establish favourable conditions for further, ‘bottom up’ development. This
view has been recently countered in Easterly’s (2006) contention that ‘the rich have
markets, the poor have bureaucrats’ encapsulating the current ‘clinical economics’
debate—really the old command economy debate—about whether ‘development’ itself
contains an inherent fault, or contradiction, owing to its need, at some level, for some sort
of plan. Against the ‘planners’ of developmental initiatives, Easterly pits the Smithian logic
of the ‘searchers’, who are able to employ locally appropriate logic and the serendipitous
effects of unplanned events or unintended consequences to come up with the most cost-
effective, sustainable grass roots solution to developmental issues.
By removing bureaucracy entirely and allowing unprecedented levels of participation by
actors hitherto excluded from more formal, traditional platforms of exchange, Web 2.0
models have the potential to transform economic activity in a way of which Easterly would
surely approve. In a recent IPPR paper, Rowan (2004) proposes UK government action to
develop an online marketplace for small transactions that will bring the smallest sellers
across hundreds of sectors up to levels of market visibility and interaction usually only
available to large players—enabling efficient micro-businesses across diverse sectors, and
delivering transactional safety, localised supply, demand, and pricing information and ease
of market entry. One of the many examples Rowan provides is of his own frustration at his
inability to find a car hire firm that would provide him with a service at a reasonable price,
when there would have been many local garages with currently unused cars which, for a
low transaction cost and security, might have been glad to have hired one out much more
cheaply. Furthermore, there might even be a possibility of linking this transaction with
someone who would be happy to drive this car for him—if only an enabling mechanism
existed for stringing together the entire value chain in a way that people trusted (the need
for trust and security explains the requirement for a government-backed system, albeit
involving a minimum of enabling infrastructure).
Such a model might have enormous power in developing country contexts, where
physical and social geographies dramatically constrain economic actors’ abilities to
engage in free exchange—and even to identify the opportunities for doing so in the first
place. Importantly, this model should be achievable via mobile technology, which may
offer greater possibilities for a basic access to the internet, via email www servers such as
Agora, than has been fully acknowledged in the literature to date. It is interesting that the

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830 M. Thompson

model involves elements of Sachs’ enabling infrastructure—an element of planning—but

only to create the minimum infrastructural playing field required for a firmly Easterly-
esque, ‘searcher’-based economy.
Although not yet on the scale of Rowan’s model, there are already documented examples
of entrepreneurial activity having been triggered by mobile technology in its ability to
reduce transaction costs within cash-based societies, broaden trade networks and reduce
the need to travel (Opoku-Mensah and Salih, 2007). For example, a recent survey of mobile
phone users in Kigali, Rwanda suggests that mobiles are allowing microentrepreneurs in
developing countries to develop new business contacts on a peer-to-peer basis in a variety
of ways (Donner, 2006). In suggesting pragmatic new relationships between enabling
infrastructure and localised, networked entrepreneurialism, the opportunities implied by
Web 2.0 models such as Rowan’s, together with emerging evidence of technology-
enhanced peer-to-peer entrepreneurial activity on the ground, would seem to demand
attention within both camps of the clinical economics debate.

2.5 How Web 2.0 can Contribute to Development’s New Institutional

Theory Debate

To Web 2.0’s ability to inform current debates on participation, development of civil

society and economic inclusion can be added institution-building. The fourth currently
significant debate within development studies to which Web 2.0 can make a contribution is
Moore’s (2000) contention that states can be made more legitimate by increasing their
dependence upon funding by their own citizens (rather, e.g. than bypassing such
dependence by selling commodities into international markets). The implication of
Moore’s position is that the current emphasis on ‘good governance’—improving existing
institutions—should be replaced by a focus on challenging such institutions by increasing
their dependence on their citizens. In this view, developmental transformation stems from
the establishment of light, but popularly mandated and sustained, political and institutional
structures and enabling infrastructure for the private economic activity required to fund
such a transformed state.
Such a transformation is, of course, not straightforward: Moore’s emphasis on the
difficulties of creating the institutional conditions under which powerful political interests
can be made more answerable echoes Wilson’s (2004, p. 44) view that a liberally diffused
ICT infrastructure will always be opposed by ‘those who calculate that the introduction of
these new resources undercuts in some way their own institutional interests as regulators,
ministry officials or telephone company managers’, and who will seek a controlled
diffusion of access. Later, Wilson concludes that ‘the shift between private and public is at
the heart of the Information Revolution’ (2004, p. 98), providing examples from Brazil and
China of how network diffusion is usually the outcome of a struggle between
‘informational champions’ and political elites.
In its ability to generate an alternative physical infrastructure and network-enabled
social life, Web 2.0 poses an implicit challenge to all existing forms of state monopoly,
rent-seeking and cultural control—whilst providing a platform for private economic
activity. In particular, established, successful websites such as the UK’s theyworkfor-
you.com, which supports wiki-based commentary on MPs’ performance and political
issues, the massive popularity of collaborative sites such as MySpace and Facebook as
venues for political critique as well as social networking, and China’s ‘Google problem’

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(Thompson, 2006) all demonstrate the ability of ‘weapons of mass collaboration’ (Tapscott
and Williams, 2006) to threaten the most established of power structures; a recent example
of this is Mzalendo (sub-titled ‘Eye on Kenyan Parliament’), an active, Kenyan version of
theyworkforyou.com, at www.mzalendo.com. This is, of course, even before many
developing countries start to engage with the ‘e-government’ revolution that seeks to alter
fundamentally the nature of interaction between citizens and public bureaucracy.
Perhaps most importantly, however, with the increased participation by citizens in Web
2.0-based forms of interaction comes a corresponding growth in the culture of openness
upon which Web 2.0 logic depends. Open standards, increased transparency (which can
lower transaction costs), and choice of information is arguably generating a ‘new
economics of intellectual property’ (ibid., 2006), where the defence of proprietary, closed
and restricted power structures starts to appear increasingly pointless and isolated against a
tide of social and economic change where real power, influence and value creation have
begun to shift elsewhere. Within the development literature, the need to encourage greater
articulation by an often disconnected state that appears suspended, balloon-like, above the
‘real business’ of social and economic exchange on the ground has been seen as a pressing
issue for some time (e.g. Lipton, 1981)—and thus Development 2.0 should examine ways
in which the provision of alternative platforms of social and economic exchange can work
positively to create a new economics of political and institutional interaction.
The dynamics of how such a new political economy can be generated via ICT are already
beginning to emerge. In an interesting edited collection of essays examining the
experiences of six African countries’ first steps in engaging with the information
revolution, Wilson and Wong (2007, p. 175) argue that all faced ‘critical negotiation issues’
that included policy reform (privatisation, liberalisation, regulation), access, national ICT
policy issues and technical issues—of which the four most difficult were access to
facilities, anticompetitive behaviour, monopoly pricing and regulation. Importantly, the
authors note that ‘at some point in all countries where the Internet expands successfully and
quickly, there emerges a small group of ICT collaborators drawn from different sectors of
society who come together to advance their vision of the networked society’. A good
example of the power of such collaboration is Schoolnet Namibia (www.schoolnet.na), a
‘bottom-up’ organisation committed to empowering children across Namibia through open
source software, open content and open access, that seems to be playing an increasing role
in national policy-making (Komen, 2007). It seems that this empirical material underscores
the need for policymakers to understand the, primarily institutional, issues that must be
addressed if networked behaviour is to get off the ground—issues that speak directly to
current debates within New Institutional Theory. Additionally, it also poses the question of
how a ‘community of practice’ of ICT collaborators may be able to catalyse the
transformation of state–society relations in the manner called for by Moore.

3 LIMITATIONS OF DEVELOPMENT 2.0 AS A PARADIGM, AND

AREAS FOR FURTHER RESEARCH

3.1 Limitations of Development 2.0

Thus far I have argued that ICT and development studies have never been so relevant to one
another, and called for a more conscious and sustained interaction between the two
disciplines—at policy and practice level, as well as in thinking about how a steady increase

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832 M. Thompson

in connectivity amongst many ‘developees’ may increasingly inform the way in which
developmental initiatives are currently planned and implemented. In outlining how Web
2.0 thinking may contribute to some of the current dilemmas in development studies at
conceptual level—a ‘Development 2.0’ way of thinking, I am aware that such concepts
may be far from the thoughts of those who dwell far from networked infrastructures in rural
or possibly conflict-laden circumstances, often existing on less than a dollar a day. There is
also a real danger that inequities in access to hardware and supporting infrastructure may
result in a Development 2.0 where a powerful minority of developees whose voices are
heard is able to influence developmental agendas in its favour at the expense of a vast,
unheard majority. Although the social, behavioural component of Web 2.0 is inclusive in
concept, its artefactual, physical component remains deeply exclusive.
Within a networked environment of social and economic exchange whose driving logic
is inclusion/exclusion, access thus becomes the paramount issue facing the Web 2.0 model
of developmental ICT; for example less than 4 per cent of Africa’s population is currently
connected to the Web, most of these concentrated in Northern African countries and South
Africa (Nixon, 2007). Wilson (2004, p. 333) provides some useful insights here, arguing
that access is a multifaceted phenomenon that includes physical, financial, cognitive,
design, content, institutional and political components, access to all of which is required to
participate in the information revolution. Whilst ‘top down’ policy may be required to
address the issue of access in a structured manner so as to ‘prime the pump’ for
Development 2.0 to occur, Development 2.0 itself is all about a set of resulting behaviours
where developees may demand increasingly to determine their own policy going forward.
Wilson cites recent quantitative research showing that although ‘the rising ICT tide lifts
all boats’, the digital divide between rich and poor countries continues to grow, and that
structuralist models are more powerful for explaining ICT diffusion patterns than optimist
models (ICT delivers benefits for all) or pessimist models (ICT leads to civil disintegration
and greater inequality). This implies that the transformational potential of Web 2.0 models
will be limited without attention to broader structural inequalities within which these are
trialled—and that ICT must always form part of an integrated philosophy of structural
transformation. Finally, Wilson highlights the importance of such thinking for
development planning as a whole, arguing that policymakers who believe in the
likelihood of a widespread structural transition towards a knowledge society will pay
considerable attention to ICT, but that ICT may be sidelined by those that see such
transformations as unlikely—pointing out the inherent riskiness of either extreme position.
What appears perhaps most likely given such zero-sum riskiness is that policymakers
will presently opt for a ‘middle way’, that takes seriously the establishment of an ICT
networked infrastructure and its associated transformational possibilities, but not at the
expense of other, more immediately pressing infrastructural concerns. This approach
avoids any tendency for Development 2.0 thinking to become disconnected from realities
on the ground, ensuring instead that it forms part of an integrated, structural approach to
broader thought about how ICT can act as a catalyst, or enabler, for development.

3.2 What Would an Agenda for Development 2.0 Research Look Like?

In the view presented in this paper, Development 2.0 could be a strand of research that
seeks a conscious and sustained dialogue between Web 2.0 models and ways of thinking,
and the broader debates and structural concerns within development studies. Although

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 ICT and Development Studies 833

linked to ‘hard’ technology in the sense that it is enabled by the increasing numbers of
people with access to ICT connectivity, Development 2.0 considers the implications of
developees’ resulting Web 2.0 social behaviours and expectations on the way in which
‘development’ is shaped and discussed. Deliberately interdisciplinary, a Development 2.0
strand of research would seek to bring together insights from the information systems (IS)
community, engineering and technology practitioners and the development studies
community. Although from different backgrounds, such researchers would share a
common interest in engendering a networked and plural form of social and economic
exchange as an ‘engine’ for a form of self-determined development that relies less on
donors and international programmes, than on releasing individuals’ own capacities for
innovation and entrepreneurialism.
As such, Development 2.0 would not be simply about how ICT can be implemented
appropriately, sustainably or equitably within a developmental context—areas in which
there is already a growing body of research within the IS community (Walsham and Sahay,
2006)—although these factors would all be relevant. Rather, it would focus on a set of
linked issues, all of which have the establishment of a particular, Web 2.0 enabling
dynamic at their core. Although space precludes a detailed discussion of these here, an
initial view of some possible issues is presented in Table 1.
It is, of course, possible that in time the need for a consciously separate, interdisciplinary
strand of Development 2.0 thought may become less marked, as development studies
increasingly engages with peoples’ demands to participate, peer-to-peer, in the information
society and such ideas move consequently to the mainstream of development thinking. At
present, however, given the levels of attention to such models within mainstream business
studies in countries with well-developed ICT infrastructures, it is surely time that
conscious—and co-ordinated—attention was devoted to examining how some of these
benefits can be made available to others.

Table 1. Development 2.0: an initial research agenda

Strand of Key focus

research
Theoretical Definition and taxonomy Development of a set of aims and definitive
features that characterise Development 2.0
Distillation of best practice Lessons learned from social applications
of Web 2.0 models in more developed
contexts, and their possible applicability
within developmental context
Critique Political economy of Development 2.0.
Ability of Development 2.0 models to
broaden access to social and economic
exchange. Relevance of Web 2.0 models
to developmental environment
Challenge/contribution to Deepening of our understanding of how
development studies Development 2.0 can challenge and contribute
to key debates in development studies,
in the manner addressed in this paper
Empirical Building a body of examples Empirical examples of attempts to introduce
Web 2.0 models to serve developmental aims
Evaluating examples’ effectiveness Understanding and proving the links between
in furthering developmental aims enabling network infrastructure and
Web 2.0-enabled social and economic behaviour

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DOI: 10.1002/jid
834 M. Thompson

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I thank Dr Liz Watson, Department of Geography, University of Cambridge, for her

invaluable suggestions and encouragement during the preparation of this paper.

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