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To unlock the full potential of ICT-related public sector innovation and digital transformation, governments must embrace collaborative working structures and leadership, is commonly argued. However, little is known about the dynamics of such collaborations in contexts of hierarchy, silo cultures, and procedural accountability. A widely voiced but empirically insufficiently substantiated claim is that bringing cross-cutting digital endeavours forward requires more lateral, network-based approaches to governance beyond traditional Weberian ideals. We test this claim by shedding light on three distinct challenges (complexity, risk, and power imbalance) encountered when implementing the specific collaborative case of the German Online Access Act (OAA) and by examining how they have been addressed in institutional design and leadership. Our analysis, which combines desk research and semi-structured expert interviews, reveals that flexible, horizontal approaches are on the rise. Taking a closer look, however, vertical coordination continues to serve as complementary means to problem-solving capability.
The process of digitalising government is rapidly gaining speed, resulting in a pressing need for increased inter-governmental integration and challenging the traditional silo structures of government. This has sparked the adoption of inter-governmental collaborative working arrangements and efforts to develop joint standards and solutions; yet little is known about how exactly this manifests itself in the context of ambitious digitalisation projects. This report provides new empirical evidence on the challenges and dynamics of collaboration within and between public organisations in order to drive digital transformation. The report begins with a literature review on collaborative management with a particular focus on collaboration in the context of government digitalisation. This literature serves as a basis for developing a set of five propositions regarding how intergovernmental collaborative digitalisation projects can be best designed and managed. Following the conceptual framework of the TROPICO project deliverable 6.3 developed by Rackwitz et al. (2020), the report investigates the interplay between system context, collaboration challenges and dynamics (i.e. complexity, risk and power imbalances), public management interventions (i.e. institutional design and leadership) as well as outcomes. Emphasis is placed upon the role of institutional design and leadership in order to cope with the challenges inherent to collaborative governance approaches. The framework and related propositions are then verified through the use of empirical findings from ten comparative case studies from five European countries (Belgium, Denmark, Estonia, Germany, and the United Kingdom). The case studies, presented in detail in TROPICO deliverable 6.3, examine the development of national government-wide online portals, as well as the implementation of municipal Smart City initiatives. The cases show that the system dynamics and challenges of digitalisation projects, such as size and scope, tend to generate resource-intensive and demanding working conditions. Creating hybrid structures that incorporate both network and hierarchical approaches has been a common approach to handling these conditions and balancing the demands of inter-departmental collaboration with the inherent accountabilities and existing working cultures of public organisations. At the steering level, a central coordinator with collaborative leadership skills was found to be key to driving the projects forward and achieving outcomes. Participatory, network-style approaches at the working group level were successful in balancing the demands of all collaborative partners and encouraging wide-scale engagement. In addition, opting for wide-scale inclusion, setting ground rules and clear processes as well as a focus on trust and social capital development proved essential. While most leadership approaches still maintain elements of transactional leadership in managing projects, collaborative leadership approaches such as bringing stakeholders together, mediating problems, and guiding and steering the process were used in many instances to handle the complexities inherent in the project objectives. In the conclusion of the report, contributions are discussed, followed by an outline for future research avenues.
Large-scale government digitalisation projects require collaborative approaches for their successful development and implementation. To shed light on these collaboration dynamics, the interplay between two integral parts of collaborative projects: the project rules, procedures, and structures (collectively known as institutional design) and the leaders managing these projects is studied. In doing so, the paper provides empirically grounded insights into the management of collaborative government digitalisation projects. Taking an institutional perspective, and the strategic-relational approach (SRA), we examine the extent to which institutional design constraints leadership behaviours, and under what conditions leaders begin to adjust and/or challenge these design features adding to the knowledge of managing digitalisation of government. To this end, we present a five-country case study of national digitalisation projects across Europe. Our results show that while clear institutional design features such as established rules, project structures, and standard operating procedures are essential at the initial stages of the projects, leaders' skills in understanding and tailoring these features are critical to handle project-related problems and moving forwards towards implementation. This underscores the importance of examining projects taking an SRA approach and the need to understand leadership behaviour in the context of the structures in which it is embedded.
Corporatization has gained scholarly attention in recent years, yet little is known regarding why many corporations are eventually terminated, and what happens to their form and functions thereafter. Reinternalizing services is one option local governments may pursue. This paper focuses on the impact of tensions (systemic contradictions) on this final resolution reached: Do local governments choose or refuse reinternalization? Conducting machine learning, I predict termination outcomes based on an original dataset of 244 ceased English and German companies (2010–2020). The results show that macrosystemic tensions are more relevant for resourcing decisions and reinternalization is less likely to be caused by formal ownership issues.
This research deconstructs complexity as a key challenge of intergovernmental digitalisation projects. While much of the literature acknowledges that the fundamental restructuring coupled with technical capacity that these joint projects require leads to increased complexity, little is known about how different types of complexity interact within the collaborative process. Using established concepts of substantive, strategic, and institutional complexity, we apply complexity theory in collaborative digital environments. To do so, eight digital projects are analysed that differ by state structure and government level. Using a cross-case design with 50 semi-structured expert interviews, we find that each digitalisation project exhibits all types of complexity and that these complexities overlap. However, clear differences emerge between national and local level projects, suggesting that complexity in digitalisation processes presents different challenges for collaborative digitalisation projects across contexts.
This paper seeks to better understand the paradigm shift towards ‘networked governance’ in digitalisation discourse. Little is known about the link between digitalisation reforms and the main reform paradigms in public management studies. By analysing French and German national digitalisation strategies over time, we find that neo-Weberian, new public management, and networked governance discourses co-exist within the digital era, although networked governance rhetoric is increasingly influential. However, a closer examination reveals that this shift in discourse is unrelated to the increased integration of nonstate actors in actual decision-making and service delivery.
Interdependence is typically regarded as the cause of inter-organizational collaboration. But it is also a consequence. Collaboration itself creates new interdependence as partners become more entwined in one another’s operations and experience the vetoes, compromises, delays, and risks inherent in joint working. This paradox – mitigating one set of interdependencies by creating another – renders collaborative relations inherently unstable. Dissolution may occur if “ex-post” interdependence becomes more troublesome than the original “ex-ante” trigger for the partnership. We test this proposition through comparative analysis of 13 sustained, aborted, and dissolved inter-municipal cooperations in English local government. Ex-post interdependence was most pronounced in those partnerships that ended in dissolution, and informed the design of replacement arrangements. It was also a contributory factor in the abortive cases. But ex-post interdependence was minimized in the group of sustained collaborations by management actions that streamlined the coordination burden imposed by joint working. These findings have implications for partnership design, the collaborator’s skillset, and theories of collaborative public management.
Why do local governments create and reform public service companies, given their uncertain economic benefits and potential damage to accountability and service transparency? Taking an extended transaction cost perspective, we argue that corporatization—the provision of public services by publicly owned companies—is a function of fiscal hardship, the decision maker’s economic orientation and the level of operator transparency. Using a two-way fixed effects regression, we test this expectation on 680 investment reports of 34 German cities from 1998 to 2017, representing 11,062 year-corporatized entity combinations. We show that the drivers of corporatization are sensitive to the depth of local ownership analyzed. In doing so, we highlight the theoretical need and potential for conceptual differentiation between ownership levels along a corporation’s lineage. Exploiting the data’s panel structure, we also find that the intensity of corporatization has heightened since the late 1990s, largely due to increasingly complex corporate structures of indirect ownership.
This dissertation explores corporatization–the provision of public services by publicly-owned companies–as a specific public management reform that has strongly been endorsed in the last decades. However, despite the significance of corporatization in public administration and the controversy over its viability as a strategy for enhancing public service provision, there is limited empirical research on its trajectory and associated effects. This dissertation fills this important gap in the literature by examining the causes, dynamics, and consequences of corporatization. It challenges the claim that we are witnessing a resurgence of the state in recent years, resulting in a pendulum shift from the private to the public sector. A mixed-methods approach is employed to analyze three original datasets from English and German local government contexts. Theoretical perspectives rooted in rational choice are complemented by those accounting for irrational ambiguity to capture the unique ambidexterity of corporatization. After clarifying the theoretical background in Chapter 1, this exploration unfolds across three empirical chapters. Chapter 2 investigates what drives corporatization. It reveals that ownership structures in corporatization have become increasingly complex and political–rather than economic–incentives may explain shifts toward indirect municipal ownership. Chapter 3 examines what causes corporatization to reverse. It shows that a return of services to the core local government after a company closes is less likely than other forms of service provision, while the type of service is the factor that matters most for termination decisions. Chapter 4 analyzes how local governments experience and cope with reverse corporatization. Local governments and their employees evidently and mutually impact the return process, which can induce private sector-informed change within the bureaucracy, albeit with limited transformative power. Ultimately, this dissertation finds no clear evidence of a pendulum shift toward the local public sector. This conclusion follows from conceptual and empirical differentiation and depends on how corporatization is framed, as well as on the specific country, service type, and dimension of public influence considered. It also suggests that the notion of the pendulum shift needs reevaluation. For practitioners, this holds several implications that encourage optimism about reform, and advise against an arbitrary approach to diversifying costs.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
A large body of literature claims that ICT and digitalisation have triggered broad organisational and cultural changes in public organisations. These changes have led many to conclude that a new era has begun that is characterised by collaboration within intra-and intersectoral networks and this has become a key paradigm for public sector governance and innovation. Yet, empirical evidence of a shift towards “Networked Governance” remains limited, and few have explored further the linkages between digitalisation and collaboration in the public sector. Work Package 6 of the TROPICO project addresses this void by providing a meta-analysis of the design, coordination, and implementation of national digitalisation strategies in eight European countries with different administrative traditions (Estonia, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Spain, and UK). By coding the countries’ first significant and most recent strategies, we examine whether there is evidence supporting the argument of a paradigmatic shift with respect to public sector governance and collaboration. The final analysis is based on 8496 codes and on an additional questionnaire filled out by the relevant TROPICO partners’ country teams. Based on our results we cannot conclude that a Networked Governance is emerging in the era of digital government, but rather find confirmation that all reform paradigms are present in governments’ digitalisation efforts. In fact, the way in which digital transformation of the public sector is put forward in the strategies may strengthen hierarchical patterns of command and control. Findings further indicate that over time collaboration has changed regarding scope and motives, while its intensity has remained relatively weak. Moreover, administrative traditions do not serve as explanatory approach for country variations in the context of digitalisation strategies. Rather, divergences are explained by the different geneses and purposes of the documents. However, we observe similarities in the perceived success factors: a common vision, cultural change, accessibility, leadership and trust are main recurring themes. Furthermore, we find no conclusive evidence that governance paradigms and collaborative arrangements in the digitalisation strategies influencethe performance of digital government. Lastly, in the conclusion of the report, we address some recommendations to practitioners for designing and implementing digitalisation strategies
Despite claims of a paradigmatic shift toward the increased role of networks and partnerships as a form of governance—driven and enabled by digital technologies—the relation of “Networked Governance” with the pre-existing paradigms of “Traditional Weberian Public Administration” and “New Public Management” remains relatively unexplored. This research aims at collecting systematic evidence on the dominant paradigms in digitalization reforms in Europe by comparing the doctrines employed in the initial and most recent digitalization strategies across eight European countries: Estonia, France, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, Norway, Spain, and the United Kingdom. We challenge the claim that Networked Governance is emerging as the dominant paradigm in the context of the digitalization of the public sector. The findings confirm earlier studies indicating that information and communication technologies tend to reinforce some traditional features of administration and the recentralization of power. Furthermore, we find evidence of the continued importance of key features of “New Public Management” in the digital era.