Conference Agenda

Digital transformation (DT) is reshaping how public services are delivered and how governments interact with stakeholders, marking a new era of digital governance. More than a technological shift, it is a process that redefines organisational culture and stakeholder engagement, fostering greater transparency, integrity, and public participation.

Drawing through the lens of Digital-Era Governance, in which governments prioritise service reintegration and adopt holistic, joined-up approaches to policymaking, leveraging digitalisation to enhance efficiency, coordination, and responsiveness, this paper explores the evolution of DT within the trajectory of administrative reform in Portugal from 1985 to the present. It adopts an exploratory approach, drawing on a content analysis of government programmes and key policy documents over the last four decades. The study seeks to identify the main features of DT in Portuguese public administration, assess its impact on administrative reform, and examine how it has fostered innovation and collaborative governance models.

Preliminary findings indicate that digital components have been increasingly integrated into administrative reforms, with a stronger emphasis over the past two decades. The urgency of digitalisation, accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic and the Recovery and Resilience Plan (PRR), has driven efforts to expand citizen access, improve coordination, and modernise public services. This paper forms the first stage of a broader investigation that will incorporate semi-structured interviews and apply Process Tracing to uncover the causal mechanisms behind DT in the Portuguese context, contributing to comparative studies on digital reform across Europe.

In our time, governance (and public administration as part of it) is undoubtedly influenced by many factors, often creating conflicting demands for development. One such phenomenon is the need to meet technological challenges, including the digital explosion, which is being given particular impetus today by the emergence and growing presence of artificial intelligence. There is perhaps no need to justify the assertion that there is a need for a permanent redesign of the eGovernment coordination system, which is a challenge for legislators, practitioners and academics alike.

In our study, we will approach the focus of the study partly from a theoretical-dogmatic and partly from an empirical perspective. First, we want to review the domestic (Hungarian) and international (including the European Union) efforts to digitise public administration, and use statistical data and empirical research findings to assess the trends in our region and the responses to the challenges of some of the model states. Subsequently, we will identify, on a theoretical basis, the types of public administration activities that can be theoretically based on digital foundations (as one aspect of this, on artificial intelligence-driven foundations) and, in this context, explore the tools that can be used (e.g. machine learning, expert systems, combinations of these).

In their view, the democratic state can be linked to digitalisation on two fronts. From an organisational law perspective, this basically calls for a rethinking of the relationship between centralisation and decentralisation, which, as some in the mainstream literature have argued, is linked to the strengthening of decentralisation. Based on the results of our research, we are of the opinion that the result is the opposite: based on the Hungarian experience, the state tends to view the use of digital tools as a means of centralisation. On the operational side, the legislative efforts made so far can be linked to the principle of subsidiarity, the building of a customer-friendly public administration and the intention to increase efficiency, which we intend to review according to a complex approach.

Our research shows that some sectors are more successful in applying technological innovations, while others are less successful, and in this respect - for Hungary and our region - financial administration can be considered a success story. Accordingly, in the second part of our study we will review the digitisation attempts in the financial sector, list the legal institutions that can be identified on the way to the development of eGovernment, and try to identify possible directions for further development from an analytical and evaluative perspective. Our study will conclude with a presentation of the latest step in Hungarian legislation, the Digital Citizenship Programme, in the context of which we intend to draw attention to possible anomalies and challenges facing public administrations.