Centre for Digital Governance
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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.
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.
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.
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.
In today's world, disasters, both natural and manmade, are becoming increasingly frequent, and new solutions are of a compelling need to provide and disseminate information about these disasters to the public and concerned authorities in an effective and efficient manner. One of the most frequently used ways for information dissemination today is through social media, and when it comes to real-time information, Twitter is often the channel of choice. Thus, this paper discusses how Big Data Analytics (BDA) can take advantage of information streaming from Twitter to generate alerts and provide information in real-time on ongoing disasters. The paper proposes TAGS (Twitter Alert Generation System), a novel solution for collecting and analyzing social media streaming data in realtime and subsequently issue warnings related to ongoing disasters using a combination of Hadoop and Spark frameworks. The paper tests and evaluates the proposed solution using Twitter data from the 2018 earthquake in Palu City, Sulawesi, Indonesia. The proposed architecture was able to issue alert messages on various disaster scenarios and identify critical information that can be utilized for further analysis. Moreover, the performance of the proposed solution is assessed with respect to processing time and throughput that shows reliable system efficiency.
As the research domain of digital government continues to develop as an important body of scholarly research, it is important to understand the core theoretical and philosophical basis of the discipline. Yet, in the domain of digital government, such an understanding does not exist. Therefore, there is currently a need for critical discussion about the concrete role of research philosophy in digital government research. This paper makes a first step in driving such a discussion by presenting arguments and discussion on the relevance of an interpretivist research philosophy for the domain of digital government. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of an interpretivist ontology and epistemology for digital government, discusses relevant theories and methods, and concludes with an overview of what is essential for conducting and carrying out interpretivist digital government research. This paper’s contributions represent one of the first concentrated efforts to lay out initial foundations for the role of interpretivism, and research philosophy more generally, for digital government research.
Environmental monitoring of rivers is a cornerstone of the European Union's Water Framework Directive. It requires the estimation and reporting of environmental flows in rivers whose characteristics vary widely across the EU member states. This variability has resulted in a fragmentation of estimation and reporting methods for environmental flows and is exhibited by the myriad of regulatory guidelines and estimation procedures. To standardise and systematically evaluate environmental flows at the pan-European scale, we propose to formalise the estimation procedures through automation by reusing existing river monitoring resources. In this work, we explore how sensor-generated hydrological open government data can be repurposed to automate the estimation and monitoring of river environmental flows. In contrast to existing environmental flows estimation methods, we propose a scalable IoT-based architecture and implement its cloud-layer web service. The major contribution of this work is the demonstration of an automated environmental flows system based on open river monitoring data routinely collected by national authorities. Moreover, the proposed system adds value to existing environmental monitoring data, reduces development and operational costs, facilitates streamlining of environmental compliance and allows for any authority with similar data to reuse or scale it with new data and methods. We critically discuss the opportunities and challenges associated with open government data, including its quality. Finally, we demonstrate the proposed system using the Estonian national river monitoring network and define further research directions.
Interoperability is a core component for any successful governmental digitalization initiative. Though there are numerous ways to build and enable this interoperability, it is possible to identify commonly occurring building blocks. This short report identifies these building blocks, maps them to relevant and common policy goals, and presents a reference architecture model for a digital government interoperability platform. To identify the relevant components of this architecture, desk research was conducted to identify common policy goals associated with interoperability, a workshop was conducted and a comprehensive systematic and comparative study was conducted that analyzed digital government interoperability platforms in twenty countries. The results of this report represent one of the most comprehensive studies to date on digital government interoperability and should, therefore, be of high interest for governmental practitioners, industry, and academics involved with interoperability studies and initiatives.