Digital self-services have become a central part of digital government, enabling citizens to apply for benefits, submit documentation, and interact with public authorities online. While these systems aim to improve efficiency and accessibility, they also shift administrative work, such as interpreting rules, navigating procedures, and demonstrating eligibility, from public officials to citizens. As a result, interacting with digital public services can generate administrative burdens for citizens in the form of learning, compliance, and psychological costs. Although administrative burden theory offers a useful lens for understanding such experiences, research and public organizations still lack practical approaches for identifying where these burdens arise within digital service delivery. Existing research often focuses on policy design, system usability, or citizen outcomes, providing limited guidance on how burdens become visible in concrete digital service encounters and how they can be traced to the socio-technical arrangements that shape them. This paper develops an empirically grounded, practice-based conceptual framework for identifying administrative burdens in digital self-services. The framework links citizens’ experienced burdens to policy design, digital infrastructures, and organizational practices and operationalizes this perspective through a diagnostic tool for analyzing digital services. Drawing on iterative engagement with qualitative material from research of digital welfare services in Norway, the paper further demonstrates the analytical application of the framework through examples from the Norwegian Labour and Welfare Administration (NAV). The framework contributes to digital government research by providing a structured approach for diagnosing administrative burdens and identifying potential intervention points in digital public services.
Digital sovereignty—the capacity of states to exercise control over digital infrastructures, data, platforms, and technological development—has become a critical concern in the era of Artificial Intelligence (AI)-driven digital transformation. As governments increasingly rely on global cloud providers, proprietary AI systems, and transnational data ecosystems, questions of autonomy, accountability, and long-term strategic capability intensify. Existing literature, however, offers limited empirical insight into how digital sovereignty is understood and operationalised in the Global South, particularly within AI-enabled public sector contexts. This study addresses this gap by developing and empirically grounding a multi-dimensional framework of digital sovereignty in Kenya’s public sector. Employing a qualitative case study approach, the research draws on fourteen semi-structured interviews with government, policy, and industry stakeholders. The findings reveal that digital sovereignty is negotiated across operational, strategic, and epistemic dimensions, shaped by infrastructural dependency, fragmented governance, and trade-offs between efficiency and control, with implications for trust and service delivery.
For over a century, the public sector has used information technology to enable and streamline administrative tasks. Today, welfare benefit administration in Scandinavia predominantly occurs through a combination of automation and digital self-service, both of which rely heavily on national data registries. This has led to increased government efficiency in many areas, and improved service quality for most citizens. However, automation and digital self-service also impose several demands on citizens regarding IT access, skills and competencies, as well as their personal characteristics and life history. In this paper, we explore and illustrate these demands through a series of vignettes based on in-depth qualitative studies of citizens and frontline employees in Scandinavia. We conclude by classifying the various types of demands and discussing them in relation to existing research and current practices for public service provision.
