Exploring patterns of sustainable development, governance and E-infrastructure capacities of nations for global equity praxis

World development under the “modernity project” over the last 200 years has resulted in the chronic widening of economic and political gaps between the haves and the have-nots with significant global cultural and ecosystem challenges. At the bottom of these challenges is the issue of resource limitations on the fixed planet with increasing population. The problem is further compounded by inequitable pleasure-driven and poverty-driven ecological depletion and pollution by the haves and the have-nots respectively. These challenges are explored in the dissertation as a global equitable sustainable development problem through critical social research and a complex adaptive organizational system conceptual framework.; From this conceptual framework, it is argued that a balanced scorecard based performance management and “lobalization” (from local to global governance), a national governance framework that is internally (locally) balanced with external (global) forces but driven by the civil society through the process of operational citizenship and knowledge-based regimes might help to address the problem. In making this argument, empirical definition for sustainable development, governance, and electrical/electronic infrastructure (E-infrastructure) management as national capacity factors are used to rank 132 nations and explore their performance patterns based on cross-sectional secondary data available as of September 2001.; The analysis of the performance ranking and patterns suggested that high national governance capacity is probably a necessary, though not sufficient, condition for both E-infrastructure management and sustainable development, as defined in the dissertation. Other possible conditions, such as the structural viability of polities that were partitioned and amalgamated by colonial/hegemonic powers, geocultural homogeneity for shared meaning of progress, and global regional structures instead of a global North-South dichotomy are suggested for further exploration.; Instead of the traditional approaches of global system social research, three complementary models for understanding global progress philosophically, historically, and organizationally are discussed as the basis of the proposed lobalization-based public policy process framework for bridging the performance gaps among nations. The dissertation suggests that such a framework may support global equity praxis to minimize the negative impacts of the modernity project while building on its positive outcome toward overall human well-being in the emerging “E-global” world.