Although artificial intelligence (AI) is heralded as a transformative force, the challenges of integrating the technology into public welfare services remain underexplored. Many AI projects hold great potential but stall before full implementation, failing to progress beyond the pilot phase. In response, we have examined machine learning (ML), a subset of AI techniques, in the context of eldercare, a key public welfare service, where an aging population and labor shortages have intensified the demand for technological solutions. Drawing on a qualitative study in an eldercare department in a Danish municipality and guided by a sociotechnical framework, we investigated two projects that applied ML to optimize work planning and client rehabilitation. Despite high expectations, funding, and strong strategic support, neither project progressed beyond the pilot phase into daily operations, making them compelling examples for understanding the challenges in using ML in public welfare services. Our analysis reveals eight challenges, shaped by the interplay among technology, people, structure, tasks, regulation, and ethics. By implication, we offer new insights into the multifaceted and sociotechnical challenges of using ML in public welfare services.
Computer scientists have developed argument mining and mapping tools to identify, classify, and interpret argument structures. These tools help scale up citizen deliberation, improve the quality of argumentation, and harvest deliberative outcomes more effectively. However, little is known about how they affect individuals with different personalities or social backgrounds. We investigate whether a novel facilitated form of argument mapping—“argument mapping facilitation”—can improve equality and reduce dominance in synchronous online deliberation. We study an online dialogue on sentencing policy, where participants were randomly assigned to either standard facilitation or enhanced visual facilitation using an argument mapping tool. Based on video observations, surveys, and interviews, we find that argument mapping facilitation improves internal equality by highlighting arguments from minority and less active individuals. It also externalises ownership of arguments, which may make dominant participants less attached to their initial views and more open to reflection. At the same time, the structured and depersonalised nature of mapping risks diminishing the salience of personal narratives and experiential forms of reasoning, suggesting that careful design is needed to ensure these contributions are not displaced. By situating these findings within debates on deliberative and representative democracy, the paper clarifies what is at stake when digital tools mediate the deliberative forums that increasingly inform representative institutions.
This article examines how South African Twitter users engaged with the 2023 State of the Nation Address (SONA), treating the event as both a symbolic performance of state authority and a discursive site of public contestation. Drawing on performance theory, the concept of affective publics, and counter-performance, the study analyzes tweets posted in the days leading up to and on the day of the SONA. Using a mixed methods approach combining sentiment analysis, thematic mapping, and interpretive discourse analysis, the article explores how digital publics anticipated, emotionally reframed, and critically engaged with the President's speech. Findings show that energy (loadshedding) emerged as the most emotionally charged theme, provoking anger, irony, resignation, and cautious optimism. Rather than passively consuming the performance, Twitter users enacted affective counterperformances that questioned the coherence of state narratives and re-scripted the meaning of the SONA. These reactions reflected broader concerns about political legitimacy, governance performance, and public trust that characterized South Africa's political environment during this period. By analyzing emotionally saturated digital responses to state ritual, the study contributes to research on digital political communication, affective publics, and symbolic power. It expands the geographic and theoretical scope of performance studies by centering African political discourse and digital counter-publics.
Wearable health data, generated continuously by consumer and medical wearables and their companion platforms, have become a critical object of public-sector information governance. Yet the EU General Data Protection Regulation, the U.S. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, and Taiwan's Personal Data Protection Act remain poorly aligned with continuous, platform-mediated, and cross-border data flows. This article proposes Good Data Service Practice (GDSP) as a co-regulatory policy instrument that operates as an institutional overlay to statutory regulation. Drawing on policy-tools theory and the information-polity literature, the study conducts a qualitative comparative legal-framework analysis of the three jurisdictions and identifies a shared pattern of instrumental misalignment between strong legal authority and weak operational governance capacity. By reframing data sovereignty as governed interoperability, GDSP offers digital-government decision-makers a transferable instrument for operationalising accountability, trust, and public values in data-intensive environments.
Two different external socio-technical developments – the (ecological) sustainability transition and the digital transition – require governments to build the capability to respond and lead the way. While there is extensive literature on the sustainable transition and on the digital transition, so far limited attention has been paid to the interconnectedness of these transitions. Furthermore, a thorough understanding of the government capabilities needed to make this ‘twin transition’ work, is lacking. In this study, we aim to bring these separate strands of literature together to identify the required government capabilities for the twin transition. Based on a narrative literature review, we identify institutional, organizational and individual capabilities and highlight interfaces between these levels. We conducted an exploratory test of the value of the framework in two Dutch cities. Our research results in a multilevel conceptual framework of government capabilities for the twin transition. This framework enables governments to strategically develop their capabilities and provides a basis for further academic research on this topic.
Summary This article reviews the co-evolution of public administration reform and digital government transformation in Vietnam from the early reform period to 2025. It demonstrates that digital government in Vietnam has developed not as a stand-alone technological initiative, but as an integral component of long-term administrative reform shaped by political priorities, institutional design, and national development strategies. By tracing successive reform phases and the evolution of e-government and digital government architectures from Version 1.0 to Version 4.0, the study highlights a gradual shift from fragmented, infrastructure-oriented digitization toward a coordinated, architecture-driven model of digital governance. The findings underline the importance of centralized coordination, interoperability, and institutional coherence in sustaining digital government reforms, offering policy-relevant insights for governments pursuing administrative modernization under conditions of institutional continuity.
Digital transformation in local government represents an institutional rather than a purely technical process. It unfolds under conditions of resource scarcity, vendor dependency, and competing accountability demands, conditions particularly pronounced in municipalities operating at the margins of administrative capacity. This study examines how local government actors in a German regional context interpret and enact digital transformation within these constraints. Drawing on six focus groups with thirty officials from twenty-five municipalities, it combines the Technology-Organization-Environment framework with Suchman's legitimacy typology into an integrated TOE-L analytical model. The analysis identifies two interrelated mechanisms of legitimacy work: legitimacy-capacity decoupling and guerrilla legitimation. Both illustrate how administrations sustain credibility when reform ambitions exceed capacity. Together, these dynamics constitute reflexive legitimacy work, that is, the conscious management of symbolic and practical tensions in digital reform. Conceptually, the study reframes legitimacy as an operational capability of governance. It advances institutional and public management theory by showing how local administrations govern through legitimacy under constraint.
The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the need for digital transformation in public sector governance, particularly in Southern African parliaments. However, limited empirical research has examined how digital transformation unfolded within parliamentary institutions in the Global South. This study examines the barriers, benefits, and enablers of digital transformation in Southern African parliaments during the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on empirical evidence from parliamentary actors, the paper shows that digital transformation was not a linear or purely technical process, but a context-dependent governance response shaped by structural constraints, institutional capacity, and leadership agency. Key barriers included financial limitations, infrastructure gaps, digital skills deficits, and cybersecurity concerns, all of which influenced the pace and scope of digital adoption. Despite these challenges, the pandemic acted as a catalyst for innovation, enabling parliaments to maintain legislative continuity, improve operational efficiency, and expand access to parliamentary information. However, the findings reveal that these benefits were uneven and conditional, with rural connectivity gaps and high data costs limiting inclusive participation. The study demonstrates that digital transformation outcomes depend on the interaction between barriers, benefits, and enablers, with leadership playing a critical mediating role. It further argues that the democratic value of digitalization is contingent upon equitable access and institutional readiness. The paper contributes to digital governance research by advancing a context-sensitive understanding of parliamentary digital transformation in the Global South.
A smart city approach places citizens at the center of decision-making. However, only a small proportion of citizens actually engage in participatory initiatives. Although citizen participation has been extensively studied, limited empirical evidence exists on how citizens’ awareness of participatory initiatives relates to both their participation and their perception of municipal efforts to promote participation. This paper analyses these relationships using a Propensity Score Matching (PSM) approach based on survey data from a medium-sized city in Argentina. Since the factors associated with participation and perceptions of municipal promotion may also shape citizens’ awareness of government programs, PSM is used to improve comparability between aware and non-aware citizens and to examine the association between awareness of participatory initiatives and participation outcomes. The results show statistically significant differences in both participation propensity and perceptions of municipal promotion between citizens who are aware of these initiatives and those who are not. Awareness is positively associated with prior civic engagement, visiting the municipal website and age, and negatively associated with being a woman. Policy implications highlight the importance of disseminating successful participatory experiences and strengthening communication strategies to encourage broader citizen engagement.
Emergent digital technologies keep redefining the (porous, yet analytically useful) online/offline participation dichotomy, yet the study of this evolution remains fragmented across the fields of public management, digital governance, and civic culture. Drawing on a narrative literature review, this article offers a conceptual synthesis of three central debates at the intersection of digital media and citizen participation. First, whether online participation constitutes an authentic form of citizen involvement. Second, whether digital media fundamentally expand the repertoire of participatory practices or simply replicates offline forms in digital environments. Third, whether online participation mobilizes or demobilizes traditional offline participation. Anchored in a sociotechnical perspective, this article offers explanations of how affordances from emergent technologies and evolving citizenship norms are shaping offline and online participatory practices. Points for Practitioners While online participation can mobilize offline participation, it can also lead to passive involvement (slacktivism), making it essential to design digital initiatives that encourage deeper citizen participation. Emerging trends suggest that citizens prefer personalized, expressive, and network-driven forms of participation, requiring public administrators to integrate digital tools that align with these preferences. To fully leverage online participation, policymakers should integrate insights from public management, civic culture, and digital governance to develop more effective participatory frameworks.
This article presents a longitudinal analysis of Czech citizens’ attitudes toward e-Government services before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using two original surveys (n=611 in 2019, n=613 in 2021), the study examines whether support for digitalisation, awareness of digital tools, perceived benefit, and actual usage changed during the pandemic. While general support remained high in both years, findings show minimal change in public behaviour, with usage growing only modestly and awareness remaining low. Structural divides, especially by age, education, and digital literacy, largely persisted. The pandemic amplified existing engagement among some users but did not substantially transform underlying attitudes. The article concludes with recommendations for inclusion-focused policies, simplified service design, and strategic communication.
Government efforts to regulate sustainability depend on the quality, comparability, and verifiability of information flows from regulated organizations to oversight bodies. In many emerging economies, ESG reporting is still produced through spreadsheets, surveys, or stand-alone disclosure tools outside authoritative accounting systems, weakening auditability, increasing reconciliation costs, and limiting transaction-level verification. Drawing on digital government research on regulatory information infrastructures, machine-readable regulation, and data-driven regulatory delivery, this paper argues that ESG oversight is fundamentally an information-governance problem: enforceability depends on standardized semantics, controlled provenance, and interoperable reporting pipelines that support automated validation and traceable auditing. The paper develops a conceptual design synthesis integrating (i) digital government and regulatory information infrastructure scholarship, (ii) sustainability accounting and environmental management accounting (EMA), and (iii) ERP and management accounting change. It specifies an implementable Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)-to-regulator architecture and derives three analytical propositions concerning embedding depth, traceability, and scope conditions. Using SAP FI/CO as an illustrative example, the framework embeds sustainability attributes within routine accounting objects and control processes. It operationalizes this through three levers: (1) an ESG chart-of-accounts addendum, (2) carbon and energy sub-ledgers for cost-object and asset-level attribution, and (3) machine-readable ERP-to-regulator reporting (API/XBRL-style) with validation rules, access controls, provenance logging, and exception workflows. Bangladesh is used as an illustrative policy context rather than an empirical case study. The paper's contribution is a regulator-ready conceptual architecture that links ERP-based accounting infrastructure to ESG auditability and regulatory enforceability, offering a pathway to scale sustainability assurance in ERP-mature sectors without creating parallel reporting stacks.
This paper investigates policy documents on digital transformation in the public sector and whether technological optimism also risks obscuring constitutional, democratic, and ethical principles. Two analytical tasks were undertaken: first, we mapped policy documents originating from a multi-level setting; and second, we explored the extent to which constitutional, democratic, and ethical principles are articulated. To explore the extent to which these principles are articulated the concept of a public ethos was utilized. A public ethos contains principles associated with a liberal representative democracy and a Weberian bureaucracy. The analysis underscores the need for research on maintaining a public ethos in politics associated with digital transformation. The policy documents that were analyzed lack ideas concerning democratic legitimacy, legal certainty, ethics in the public encounter, and systems for public scrutiny. The main conclusion is that the space in the documents is dominated by technological optimism, while constitutional, democratic, and ethical principles are given lower priority. The need for further research includes questions concerning (1) conditions for civic participation/party politics, (2) management issues concerning skill/learning development among public employees and on control mechanisms, (3) issues at the frontline of public administration on how the digital transformation affects the treatment of vulnerable/marginalized populations.
This study explores evidence-based urban planning (EBUP) within three secondary cities in the Global South-eThekwini, Khorog, and Bosaso-emphasizing public sector capacity to utilize data in urban management. Amidst the proliferation of data and advanced analytical tools, many local administrations struggle with effective data use due to limited resources, technology, and governance frameworks. This paper examines how urban planners mobilize, integrate, and apply data to create actionable evidence for city planning, considering the socio-political and technological landscapes that influence these processes. By analyzing qualitative data from interviews and case studies, this research highlights the challenges and potential of EBUP to address urban issues in data-scarce environments. The concept of good enough evidence is explored, advocating for practical, adaptable, and locally tailored planning efforts that prioritize immediate urban needs over exhaustive data collection. This approach seeks to balance ambition with practicality, offering a pragmatic pathway for cities facing constraints in resources and capabilities.
T his special issue aims to unpack what competencies public managers, policy makers, and public leaders need to manage and cope with the digital transition and what this implies for teaching digital governance. We situate digital governance into a wider context of socio-technical change, by using a multilevel perspective based on transition scholarship and the recent debate on directionality. This allows us to capture the public sector capabilities needed for governing the different spheres of digital transition, as well as the individual skills and knowledge required from public officials. We situate the six studies in this special issue within our multilevel perspective. The contributions provide concrete examples of skills and knowledge needed and what it implies for public management programs. Furthermore, based on our multilevel framework we identify avenues for future research into organizational and strategic capabilities for the digital transition and the operational, reflective, and political skills needed to foster these capabilities.
Digital technologies are rapidly becoming deeply entrenched in society. These technologies provide challenges and opportunities for democratic and organizational processes, and social interactions between governments and citizens. In this study, we focus on the skills governance students need to obtain to fully grasp the opportunities and challenges raised by digitalization in the public sector and society at large. Using a design approach, we first identify two distinct categories of skills: operational and reflective digital skills, based on the literature, followed by a round of interviews to explore these skills in governance curricula. This resulted in a framework for Digital Governance Curricula based on skills and (future) roles of students as a) engaged citizens, b) professionals, and c) academics. Following, we test and refine our framework based on an assessment and development of three digital governance programmes. Based on our study, we derive implications for digital governance literature and lessons for digital governance course designers.
Smart cities increasingly rely on ICT-based coproduction, in which governments use digital platforms to engage citizens in reporting problems and requesting public services. While this model is often assumed to enhance inclusivity, it also raises equity concerns, as opportunities for engagement and experiences with coproduction may vary systematically across social groups. Existing research on ICT-enabled coproduction has focused primarily on participation disparities, offering mixed evidence and often overlooking inequities in earlier and later stages of engagement. Drawing on individual-level data from the San Francisco City Survey, this study examines equity across multiple stages of coproduction-including awareness of opportunities, participation, channel choice, and satisfaction-and across multiple dimensions of equity, encompassing procedural and experiential outcome. The findings show that inequities emerge at different stages for different groups, highlighting the need for ICT-based coproduction systems that address equity beyond participation alone.
