Yet the discussions with participants also offer counterpoints to the report’s
conceptualization, diagnosis, and expectation of the state in the domestic circuits of information. For instance, the report treats the state as a single body of authority which manages institutions and agencies through an administrative apparatus employing political, financial, legislative, and social coercion. But the vision of the state presented by participants did not give the impression a unified apparatus exerting its force from on high; rather they saw the state as the base of an information ecosystem, responsible for the nitty-gritty of creating, provisioning, and employing official information. Despite being highly critical of the state’s conduct in these informational capacities, the pivotal position of the state as society’s central information system was not itself challenged. In other words, while the Egyptian state was seen as failing to serve as the information
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foundation of society, the structural role it occupied was never in itself rejected. The state’s supreme import in this regard (for better or worse) was acknowledged by El- Mikawy and Ghoneim’s (2005) study of Egypt’s knowledge-base—as constructed through state, quasi-state, and private institutions—where the authors observe that “there is a governmental dominance of the supply of information” (2005, p. 5). El-Mikawy and Ghoneim go further than the AHDR’s diagnosis of the Arab information environment and in so doing anticipate much participant feedback in their examination of the forces
responsible for the quality and transmission of official information, including the supply- demand pressures and formal and informal societal rules, all of which “are often
influenced by political and cultural contexts” (El-Mikawy & Ghoneim, 2005, p. 3). The “rudimentary” sketch El-Mikawy and Ghoneim offer of Egypt’s information
ecosystem outlines the creation, dissemination, and up-stream processing of information across government, quasi-government, and private institutions in Egypt. The primary level would include the Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics
(CAPMAS) and the ministries of government. Besides producing and publishing official data, CAPMAS is also the licensing body for researchers intending to conduct field surveys, giving it the power to deny or edit research tools. The secondary knowledge sites include quasi-government bodies mentioned in participants’ responses such as
Specialized National Councils, the Information and Decision Support Center (IDSC), and the Parliament, which are intended to address issues of concern to policy-makers. All these institutions alternatively suffered from a lack of resources (in the case of the parliamentary councils), bloated and inefficient bureaucracy (as in the massive
department CAPMAS), or limited circulation (all). Putting these state-based information practices at the heart of Egypt’s information ecosystem recognizes the centrality of the state in knowledge creation, surpassing the limited scope of the AHDR while responding to the report’s call for “a fresh look at the knowledge map and those who interfere in it” (UNDP, 2003, p. 150). El-Mikawy and Ghoneim also manage to reflect the views of participants presented above. Similar to the interviews presented above, El-Mikawy and Ghoneim’s study was based on interviews with information professionals and state insiders, including academics, ministry advisors, journalists, and members of parliament. It is therefore unsurprising that many comments shared by participants in the aftermath of
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the revolution resonated with observations made by El-Mikawy and Ghoneim, though made a decade earlier.
While the AHDR emphasized the need to devolve knowledge production to a liberalized civil society sector to protect it from political influence, El-Mikawy and Ghoneim’s analysis matched the views of participants in noting that knowledge production at universities, think tanks, and the media was dependent on the quality of information offered by the state. The authors echoed participants in demanding that the state operate better as an information system rather than withdraw entirely. The study also supported the accounts of participants when describing the difficulty in accessing official
information unless one was an insider, and observed that in the absence of a culture of transparency and information sharing researchers often relied on informal contacts to gain access to crucial data. These impediments to access were attributed by participants to a confluence of professional risk-aversion and security concerns, which El-Mikawy and Ghoneim confirm in the quote below, as well as the recourse to informal
workarounds when institutionally sanctioned access is unavailable: [W]hat remains are informal channels of information collection and knowledge dissemination, e.g. personal connections and interviews. Due to the lack of a freedom of information act, many reports are not available to the public (whether journalists or researchers). Thus one has to build a network of personal friends who replace a freedom of information act. (El-Mikawy & Ghoneim, 2005, p. 23)
The other crucial issue commonly mentioned was the unreliability of data due to the variable methods employed in information gathering and processing. As illustrated in the example of manufactured FDI figures, El-Mikawy and Ghoneim observe that
inconsistent, opaque methods applied in official information in order to generate specific “facts”:
The methodologies used in collecting data are still in many cases not updated and lacks full transparency. Hence analysis depending on data must take such issue in
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consideration, and in many cases such methodologies are politicized to reveal certain figures. (El-Mikawy & Ghoneim, 2005, p. 9)