Effective administration of government and governmental organizations is a crucial part of achieving success in those organizations. To develop and implement best practices, policymakers and leaders must first understand the fundamental tenants and recent advances in public administration. Public Affairs and Administration: Concepts, Methodologies, Tools, and Applications explores the concept of governmental management, public policy, and politics at all levels of organizational governance. With chapters on topics ranging from privacy and surveillance to the impact of new media on political participation, this multi-volume reference work is an important resource for policymakers, government officials, and academicians and students of political science.

With the rapid increase in the implementation of e-Government in Africa and across the world, the need to investigate the key bottlenecks (issues) caused by the failure of a large number of e-Government projects cannot be ignored. The main purpose of this book is to contribute to the current scholarly and intellectual discourse on different aspects of e-Government such as understanding the critical issues in design, implementation and monitoring. This book specifically intends to bring out contextual issues that hugely impact on the probability for e-Government failure or success. It also differentiates itself by carefully exploring the issue of context-awareness (informed by the local context) for e-Government design and implementation, which has not been pursued in any publication in e-Government before, although it has been used in other information computational contexts. Therefore, the many theses within this book are concerned with e-Government design approaches, implementation policies and requirements, and monitoring dimensions need to be informed by the contextual characteristics in which they are implemented. This book contributes to the body of knowledge by presenting an in-depth analysis of a case of e-Government implementation. Therefore, this book has its facts backed by intermittent reference to an empirical study done in Zambia to accentuate issues in design, adoption, usage and monitoring of e-Government projects. The case articulates the methodological issues in the design and measurement of e-Government. The use of a combination of structural equation modelling (SEM), exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and advanced techniques such as principal component analysis (PCA) in investigating different aspects of e-Government in a developing country context has not been done in any previous research. The novel methodological nuances articulated in this book can go a long way toward understanding the factors explaining successful implementation of e-Government. Previous publications have used basic statistical approaches devoid of adequate scientific or statistical rigour such as descriptive statistics to arrive at factors influencing the success or failure of e-Government. Furthermore, this book contributes to the body of knowledge by emphasising the different dimensions and issues of the multidimensional perspectives of e-Government. The book explores tangible pointers for design and implementation of e-Government, giving it the thrust to potentially guide actual implementation of e-Government in African setups.

These proceedings represent the work of authors at the 13th European Conference on e-Government (ECEG 2013). The Conference this year is hosted by the Iuniversity of Insubria in Como, Italy. The Conference Chair is Professor Walter Castelnovo and the Programme Chair is Professor Elena Ferrari, both are fro the Department of Theoretical and Applied Sciences at the University of Insubria. The opening keynote address is given by Dr Gianluca Misuraca from the European Commission, Joint Research Centre, Institute for Prospective Technological Studies, Seville, Spain and Gianluca is addressing the topic "eGovernment: Past, Present & Future: A policy-research perspective for renewing governance in the digital age". The second day of the conference is opened by Dr Antoinio Cordella from the London School of Economics, London, UK, who will talk about "Public value creation: the new challenge for e-government policies". ECEG brings together, researchers, Government officials and practitioners in the area of e-Government from around the world. Participants are able to share their research findings and explore the latest developments and trends in the field which can then be disseminated to the wider community. With an initial submission of 153 abstracts, after the double blind, peer review process there are papers published in these Conference Proceedings from 40 countries including Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, Costa Rica, Croatia, Denmark, Eygpt, Germany, Greece, India, Iran, Iraq, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Pakistan, Poland, Romania, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, Slovenia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey, UK and USA. This will ensure a very interesting two days.

The second scientific World Kurdish Congress was held in October 2012 at Hewler with the theme of improving the quality of life, science and culture for progress in Kurdistan. The papers presented focused on various important aspects of culture, economy, education, health, industry and political science in Kurdistan. The objective of this conference was to create a network of academicians to exchange and develop knowledge and work together with the Kurdistan Regional Government on how to further enhance the progress within the Kurdish society. This volume is a collection of 26 studies presented at the Congress and includes an introduction by the editors and a summary report of the Congress. The topics presented here are diverse, covering several areas pertinent to the current Kurdish situation. The studies are divided into ten areas: namely, agriculture and rural development; diaspora; education and research; health and quality of life; industry; information technology and e-government; infrastructure and development; language; human rights; and politics. In the last part of the volume, the organization committee provides a compilation of recommendations from the Congress to the Kurdistan Regional Government.