Toward e-public engagement: A review of public participation for government governance

The e-public engagement plays more and more important roles in public decisionmaking process. It's essential to understand the current status, gaps, and future research directions for e-government platform design, particularly for the approaches to improve the interactive engagement with public opinions. This paper is a first attempt to review a series of literature on e-public engagement from an historical perspective by revisiting a series of concepts including the public sphere, the public engagement, the e-public sphere, and the e-public engagement. The concept of public engagement is thus clarified and the public needs framework is presented to clarify the need to re-design e-government platform contents to engage citizens in a more interactive approach. The review results of this paper suggest that a theoretical framework focusing on e-public engagement shall be investigated by future researchers.