The progress with digital adoption in governments has sparked significant research into the many facets of measuring and evaluating digital government initiatives and maturity. It is crucial to be aware of the barriers hindering progress towards the desired digital maturity. Hence, this paper critically examines the interdependence of barriers to digital maturity and organisational transformation within local government in Slovenia.

The study launched by establishing a theoretical framework for developing a digital maturity model for public organisations. This framework builds on Leavitt's extended diamond model for organisations—encompassing technology, processes, structure, people, and organisational culture—and integrates three sets of dimensions: digital principles, good governance principles, and elements of the external environment, with a particular emphasis on barriers to digitalisation. To empirically validate this model, we crafted a questionnaire evaluating the interplay between barriers to digital maturity and organisational elements in Slovenian local public administration. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with thirty public managers from local governments, and correlation analysis was utilised to assess the relationships more thoroughly.

Our findings highlight the intricate dynamics of financial, technological, and human factors as significant barriers to digital maturity in local government administration in Slovenia. Key insights reveal that insufficient financial resources represent a critical impediment, affecting quality measurement systems, accurate assessment of digital competencies, and effective cost tracking in digitalisation efforts. Furthermore, the results underscore the importance of employees' interest in digitalisation and the essential role of clear strategic direction for a successful digital transformation process. This study contributes to our understanding of the multifaceted barriers to achieving digital maturity and suggests targeted strategies for overcoming these barriers within the context of Slovenian municipalities.

Local governments are indispensable when it comes to dealing with crises (Bergström et al., 2022; Taylor et al., 2020). This, for example, became apparent in the financial crisis from 2008 and the refugee crisis from 2015, but also more recently in the approach to the Covid-19 pandemic and the migration flows due to the war in Ukraine (Bergström et al., 2022; Vargo et al., 2021). Addressing these challenges requires a considerable capacity from local governments at the subnational level (Karkin et al., 2019; Taylor et al., 2020). Given the fact that local capacity is not only about the possibilities to perform current tasks but also to perform future tasks, local governments are under constant pressure to increase their capacity. In many European countries, this pressure is reflected in a trend towards municipal amalgamations (Karkin et al., 2019; Taylor et al., 2020). However, empirical studies on the effects of municipal amalgamations are inconclusive (Blom-Hansen et al., 2016). This is mainly because local capacity is a complex and versatile concept, resulting in several aspects that can be positively, negatively, and neutrally affected by a municipal amalgamation (Tavares, 2018).

In this paper, we focus on the digital aspect of local capacity. Local digital capacity is determined by a local government’s ability to deploy digital technologies in a strategic manner. It does not only include hard- and software, but also the way in which those are applied and by whom (Fountain, 2005; Gil-Garcia et al., 2014). The importance of such a strong local digital capacity also becomes evident when addressing crises. The Covid-19 pandemic, for example, shows that digital technologies proved to be imperative during and after the crisis (European Commission, 2020). Although local digital capacity is crucial, the relation with municipal amalgamations has only been indirectly researched (Karkin et al., 2019; Tavares, 2018).

Therefore, we want to answer the following research question: “What is the impact of a municipal amalgamation on local digital capacity?”. To this end, we perform a single case study of an amalgamated municipality during a period in which it needed its (digital) capacity to deal with the crisis of Covid-19. In concrete terms, we investigate a Flemish amalgamated municipality over the period from 2017 to 2022. Flanders is the northern region of Belgium, a country that has been one of the most severely affected by the Covid-19 pandemic (Zaki & Wayenberg, 2021). We use Jane Fountain's Technology Enactment Framework as a theoretical lens to investigate the relation between this Flemish amalgamation and local digital capacity based on the distinction between objective and enacted technologies (Fountain, 2005; Zhao et al., 2018).

References

Bergström, T., Kuhlmann, S., Laffin, M., & Wayenberg, E. (2022). Special issue on comparative intergovernmental relations and the pandemic: how European devolved governments responded to a public health crisis. Local Government Studies, 48(2), 179–190. https://doi.org/10.1080/03003930.2022.2039636

Blom-Hansen, J., Houlberg, K., Serritzlew, S., & Treisman, D. (2016). Jurisdiction size and local government policy expenditure: Assessing the effect of municipal amalgamation. American Politicial Sience Review, 110(4), 812-831. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055416000320

European Commission. (2020). New Commission report shows the importance of digital resilience in times of crisis. Brussels: European Commission.

Fountain, J. (2001). Building the virtual state. Information technology and institutional change. Washington: Brookings Institution.

Gil-Garcia, J., Rentería, C., & Luna-Reyes, L. (2014). Enacting collaborative electronic government: Empirical evidence and lessons for developing countries (conference proceeding). Hawai: International Conference on System Sciences.

Karkin, N., Gocoglu, V., & Yavuzcehre, P. (2019). Municipal amalgamations in international perspective: motives addressed in scholarly research. Asia Pacific Journal of Public Administration, 41(4), 187–202. https://doi.org/10.1080/23276665.2019.1698843

Tavares, A. (2018). Municipal amalgamations and their effects: A literature review. Miscellanea Geographica, 22(1), 5–15. https://doi.org/10.2478/mgrsd-2018-0005

Taylor, C., Faulk, D., & Schaal, P. (2020). The varieties of consolidation experience: A synthesis and extension of local government consolidation models. Journal of Public and Nonprofit Affairs, 6(3), 325–353. https://doi.org/10.20899/JPNA.6.3.326-353

Vargo, D., Zhu, L., Benwell, B., & Yan, Z. (2021). Digital technology use during COVID-19 pandemic: A rapid review. Human Behavior and Emerging Technologies, 3(1), 13–24. https://doi.org/10.1002/hbe2.242

Zaki, B., & Wayenberg, E. (2021). Shopping in the scientific marketplace: COVID-19 through a policy learning lens. Policy Design and Practice, 4(1), 15–32. https://doi.org/10.1080/25741292.2020.1843249

Zhao, F., Naidu, S., Singh, G., Sewak, A., Chand, A., & Karan, M. (2018). An empirical study of e-government diffusion in Fiji: a holistic and integrative approach. Public Management Review, 20(10), 1490–1512. https://doi.org/10.1080/14719037.2017.1400585

It has long been proposed that inertia plays a crucial role for the success or failure of institu-tional change processes. The varying levels of digitalization progress in German public admin-istration, with an overall slow digitalization progress but notable exceptions such as the digital-ly transformed tax administration, raise questions about the role of inertia for digital govern-ment transformation. Data from a nationwide online survey with public employees and staff councils (n=1087) was analysed and integrated with the analysis of semi-structured expert interviews (n=44) to assess how inertia emerges in the digitalization process of public admin-istration.

The aim of the research is thus twofold: first, to add to the theoretical understanding of inertia in public sector organizations and thereby contribute to further conceptualizing the phenome-non of digital transformation in Public Administration. And second, to deepen our empirical knowledge on the manifestation of distinct inertial forces in digital government transformations conducted through different approaches and within varying institutional setups.

The study examines two advanced digital public services in Germany: internet-based vehicle registration (bottom-up digitalization, local self-government task) and digital income tax as-sessment (top-down digitalization, authorities act on federal commission).

The pandemic and citizen trust in local government in the Nordic countries

By Harald Baldersheim (University of Oslo) and Are Vegard Haug (Oslo Metropolitan University)

The pandemic has entailed a series of systemic challenges to the polities of nation-states, such as patterns of political cleavages, administrative institutions, and citizen trust in government (Behnke and Eckhard, 2022: 6). Public inquiries and an emerging body of research have reviewed a number of these challenges from national points of view. However, there are as yet fewer studies of how crisis management has unfolded at the local level of government although the majority of crisis management measures have been implemented through or have touched upon the workings of local institutions. This paper reports on results from a comparative research project (the POLYGOV project ) on local covid management in the five Nordic countries, including interactions between local, regional, and national levels of government. The paper deals, more precisely, with one aspect of the systemic challenges mentioned above, i. e. how citizen trust in local government has been affected by various aspects of local crisis management.

The paper explores five hypotheses on drivers of citizen trust in local government institutions.

1: the covid shock hypothesis – the more seriously citizens have been affected by the covid pandemic, the less they trust (local) government. The alternative hypothesis has been termed ‘the rally round the flag effect’ – crises tend to enhance the level of trust in government (Esaiasson 2021). Does the latter version also apply to local government?

2: the crisis management hypothesis – the more positively people judge the crisis performance of local government the more they trust local leaders.

3: the policy leadership hypothesis – citizen trust is a function of how they perceive the justness of covid policy measures as presented by political leaders.

4: the decentralisation/proximity hypothesis – citizen trust is a function of the level of decentralisation of covid management responsibilities.

5: the second-order level of government (Reif and Schmitt 1980, Cutler 2008, Ervik 2012) and transfer of trust hypothesis- in the eyes of citizens local government is secondary to national government; consequently, citizens’ level of trust in national governments is transferred to local government.

The paper is based on data from citizen surveys in the five Nordic countries (Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden) in the early summer of 2022.