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

Gaby Umbach and Igor Tkalec

Evaluation and Program Planning, 2022, vol. 93, issue C

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).

Keywords: Digitalisation; E-governance; E-government; Evaluation; Public services (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0149718922000726
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:epplan:v:93:y:2022:i:c:s0149718922000726

DOI: 10.1016/j.evalprogplan.2022.102118

Access Statistics for this article

Evaluation and Program Planning is currently edited by Jonathan A. Morell

More articles in Evaluation and Program Planning from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().