e-citizen capability development

This paper argues that access to public e-services encourages citizen engagement in the e-government policy making processes and the further empowerment of citizens through participation in the democratic processes of developing/transitional countries like Tajikistan. It presents e-citizenship, with e-participation as its driving force, as a phenomenon concerned with the transformation of the citizen's role and status from the e-government periphery to the e-democracy core. This transformation is mainly based on three models of e-participation, namely: push, pull and interactive. To find evidence of this transformation the five distinct types of individual instrumental freedom, identified by Amartya Sen, were tested against these models. An analytical framework, adapted from the Sen's capability approach theory, was applied to analyse the revealed evidence. A profile of e-citizens and their attributes were identified to evaluate their role in Tajikistan.