Evaluating e-governance through e-government: Practices and challenges of assessing the digitalisation of public governmental services

Abstract

Digitalisation and adaptation of governance to the digital age arguably transform the relationship between agents (i.e., public institutions) and clients (i.e., citizens) in policy-making. E-governance is the most widely used term for the result of this digital transformation in view of the changing nature of politics. This special issue zooms into digitalised public services by discussing practices and challenges in their provision, usage and evaluation. In doing so, it highlights interaction of e-governance (relationship among citizens, government, public and private actors notably in the context of digitalisation and innovation) and e-government (public services enabled by ICT). Contributions to the special issue identify challenges and pitfalls in implementing and evaluating e-governance by analysing different policy areas and geographical regions. The findings of the contributions suggest that factors of e-governance performance that potentially serve as evaluation criteria tend to be (overly) sensitive to context, i.e. policy area, systemic constellations, institutional settings, and administrative traditions in question. Consequently, attempts to evaluate e-governance, at least based on the empirical insight demonstrated in this special issue, remain limited to specific tools, instruments and contexts through which e-governance is operationalised and delivered (e.g., websites, projects and policy initiatives).