Autonomous Design Of Community Aspirations In ICT4D Initiatives: Insights From A Case Study In Nepal
Abstract
Recent scholarly works in Information and Communication Technology for Development (ICT4D) have emphasized a turn towards aspirations focused approaches to explain ICT-enabled societal change. Underlying these aspiration centric discourses are questions related to power: for instance, "who has power to aspire?" and "how do communities challenge false aspirations and create conditions for nurturing realistic aspirations?" However current work within ICT4D has weakly addressed these questions. We argue that they can be explored with the autonomous design approach as articulated in the works of Colombian anthropologist Arturo Escobar. Particularly, focused on the concept of autonomy and how it constitutes a community's capacity to aspire. We demonstrate this by building upon the concepts and empirical material from our ongoing research in a rural mountainous village in the Annapurna Region of Nepal.
Recommended Citation
Thapa, Pragyan; Thapa, Devinder; Sæbo, Øystein; Heeks, Richard; and Kc, Benju, "Autonomous Design Of Community Aspirations In ICT4D Initiatives: Insights From A Case Study In Nepal" (2025). 16th Scandinavian Conference on Information Systems. 8.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/scis2025/8