The Janus-Faced Approach to Governance

Abstract

While the Estonian digital government has received considerable attention in research and policy circles, there has been a lack of broader understanding of digital government initiatives in the context of public sector governance. By relying on literature on digital governance as well as on public sector governance and using various qualitative methods, this on-going research focuses on the public sector reforms and digital government efforts in Estonia. It reveals that the relationships between technology and public sector reforms have been broadly unintentional. Most importantly, policy communities pushing for advancement of digital government and public sector reforms are different and there is a considerable mismatch in policy-making. One hand, this divide stems from emphasis on different ideas. Some policy-makers are highly technology-centric while other assign primary role to institutions. On the other hand, considerable barriers for interagency cooperation exist as well as cooperation between public and private sector. The latter is particularly challenging as the bottom-up cooperation between private and public sector has been a particular strength in the development of digital governance in Estonia. Furthermore, relative de-centralization of online public sector services has been a source of innovation. At the same time, public sector governance has been highly centralized. These mismatches between digital governance and overall public sector governance has contributed to institutional complexity and lead to bottlenecks in advancing public sector governance and digitalization of governance.