In this study on the empowering force of ICTs, and how disadvantaged people may continue to be disadvantaged while technological change takes place, Kleine seeks answers to two questions:
How can disadvantaged people gain access to technologies that might help them to transform their lives?
Having gained access, how to ensure they are not further disadvantaged by the framing of institutions, social norms of use and ideas embedded in technologies.
Using a theoretical framework, the research explores how state ICT policies affect the lives of micro-entrepreneurs in a rural town in Chile from three standpoints:
Infocentros – free public Internet access points
Campaña Nacional de Alfabetizacion Digital – a digital literacy campaign
Chile compra – e-government initiatives, including an online public procurement system.
The theoretical richness of the capabilities approach is translated into a tool for analysis, policy making and practice, and is based on people's freedom to choose the lives they value. The tool is used as a filter for choice, and its drawback is to base everything on reason. In looking at how individual and collective choices relate to each other, Kleine found that the community frames an individual's choice, but there is a need for a choice-focused development. This framework was then used as a conceptual map to analyse elements of specific development processes, and in conjunction with the capabilities approach a study was carried out in Algun, Chile, to analyse how ICTs and state policies promoting them affected their lives. Results showed how geographical resources, particularly the aspect of proximity, play a role in structuring access to ICTs.
The study continued to explore structural barriers that prevented people from accessing the Internet by surveying use of telecentres and looking at dimensions of access, such as availability, affordability, skills threshold and norms on the use of time and space. Discussions relate to the complex local context into which state policies are introduced, and the structural conditions into which they are embedded.
Using case studies of four individuals living in Algun, the choice framework was used as a tool for analysis, to trace the complex interplay between the social structure and the individual agency. Results show how individuals use their resource portfolio to negotiate aspects of the social structure. It is quite revealing how relatively income-poor people can use their resources to successfully negotiate and overcome some structural barriers.
One barrier that individuals as supplier to the state are unable to overcome is gaining access to public e-procurement systems. The study considers the choices made by policy makers in the Chile-compra case, and how they might be persuaded to make public procurement more democratically accountable and representative of users' choices – in particular, ethical procurement its social and environmental costs.
Access to the Internet is very uneven between North and South, as revealed by this study, with corporate, state and civil society powers shaping the infrastructure, core technologies and standards. There is hope - the disadvantaged poor have their own ways of catching-up.
