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Role of Parliamentarians
Challenge for Parliaments in the information age is to ensure that laws, regulations and policies allow citizens to exploit the potential of ICTs to meet the needs of their country or region. This is a dynamic area requiring constant evaluation of strategies and assessment of progress.
Vision and leadership
Vision and leadership
Understanding the potential of ICTs for the realisation of these developmental objectives can enable parliamentarians to provide the vision and leadership required for the adoption and implementation on integrated national information and communications frameworks.
Deploying ICT infrastructure, building human capacity, establishing transparent and inclusive policy processes, establishment of a capacitated and accountable regulator, creating incentives for investment and market entry and supporting the development of appropriate content are all items likely to be on the parliamentary at some time and often simultaneously.
There are a number of interrelated factors to be addressed:
- Developing a strategic framework for ICT deployment in development to ensure long term and sustainable development.
- Creating awareness among parliamentarians on the potential of ICTs to transform developing countries. And role of government in development initiatives
- The development strategy of the UNDEP aims to mainstream ICT to contribute the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals1 set by the UN particularly those related to income, poverty reduction, education, health environment and gender equity.
- Creating economic opportunities and contributing to poverty reduction
- Managing the processes of providing basic services at lower cost and greater coverage.
- Facilitating access to information and the involvement of stakeholders through greater transparency and support for networking at every stage.
- Enhancing the capacity to measure, monitor and report progress on the goals and to strategise
Safeguarding the public interest
Safeguarding the public interest
They can do this through the safeguarding of public participatory processes that are likely to produce the best outcomes, by critically navigating the policies into laws necessary to the implementation of the vision. The quality of legislation is dependent on the awareness, skills and competence of those responsible for the passing of law. The legislative, as the representative body of the people, is the most appropriate institution to fulfil the needs and aspirations of the people, and to deal with development concerns with building the capacities of citizens and providing them with the opportunities to use these.(UNDP-APDIP, 2004:36).
Monitoring and oversight
Monitoring and oversight
In addition parliamentarians are responsible for the setting of targets for implementation of law and monitoring their progress. It is important that parliamentarians prevent law from not become wish list of unattainable objectives while not constraining their potential. While adopting best practice principles knowledgeable parliamentarians need to ensure realistic policy frameworks that acknowledge the resources limitations of developing countries.
Parliamentarians are a critical element in the monitoring and evaluation of this progress through their oversight role. While all parliamentarians should have an awareness of ICTs role in development and exposure to its benefits in their parliamentary and national structures and activities, the oversight of development of the sector and impact of policy and legislation on it, should be the function of a specialised parliamentary committee or group.
Ideally, this should be a multiparty committee that will defend the necessary countervailing interests. It should have the expertise to understand the policy interventions of Governments and to assess their likely success. Parliamentarians should understand the critical linkages in the institutional arrangements especially the role of regulators and the necessary safeguards against captured by either business or government. They should also have the resources to scan the external environment for developments that may impact on the sector or which should be harnessed for development and economic growth. By tracking technological breakthroughs, new applications and services and ways of extending information and understanding the feasibility of their adoption in developing country contexts parliamentarians can ensure that best policy choices are made.
Countries that are unable to take up the challenges posed by global technological and economic trends are increasingly marginalised, not only from the global network economy, but also in their ability to deliver on their own developmental objectives. Parliamentarians can play a critical role in ensuring the removal of existing barriers to communication, promoting of innovation, aligning critical objectives of stakeholders and unleashing new collaborations to harness the power of ICTs for development.
