Understanding governance in the digital era: An agenda for public administration research in Canada
2017; Wiley; Volume: 60; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1111/capa.12246
ISSN1754-7121
AutoresAmanda Clarke, Evert A. Lindquist, Jeffrey Roy,
Tópico(s)Legal and Policy Issues
ResumoCanadian Public AdministrationVolume 60, Issue 4 p. 457-475 Original article / Articles originauxFree Access Understanding governance in the digital era: An agenda for public administration research in Canada Amanda Clarke, Amanda ClarkeSearch for more papers by this authorEvert A. Lindquist, Evert A. LindquistSearch for more papers by this authorJeffrey Roy, Jeffrey RoySearch for more papers by this author Amanda Clarke, Amanda ClarkeSearch for more papers by this authorEvert A. Lindquist, Evert A. LindquistSearch for more papers by this authorJeffrey Roy, Jeffrey RoySearch for more papers by this author First published: 27 November 2017 https://doi.org/10.1111/capa.12246Citations: 10 [Correction added on 7 Dec 2017, after first online publication: The title for Dylan Marando and Jonathan Craft's article, “Digital Era Policy Advising: Clouding Ministerial Perspectives”, has been corrected and indicated by the symbol ^.] AboutSectionsPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Digital disruptions and opportunities How are digital technologies affecting democratic governance in Canada, and how might the digital age bolster or undermine our public institutions and collective problem-solving capacity in the coming years? Governments now face new ways to tailor and deliver services to citizens, can use social media to share information and mobilize or corrode support, and have access to collaborative platforms to facilitate crowd-sourcing inside and outside government. Governments can also capitalize on new streams of evidence to guide policy interventions, not only from “big data” generated from internal administrative operations and citizens’ and governments’ digital activities, but also from innovation labs, hackathons and advances in social science thinking, as we have seen with global interest in “nudging” and behavioural economics. At the same time, as the digital age produces unprecedented amounts of data and information that swirl through our societies, we face new balances in power and control shaped by uneven capacity to interpret and manipulate digital data flows. In addition, Clarke and Francoli (2017) identify a tension between popular enthusiasm for digital-era governance, and observations in Canadian public administration literature, which frame the digital age and the frantic pace of information exchange it facilitates as a driver of short-termism, information control and a politicization of the public service (see Marland, Giasson, and Esselment 2017; Marland 2016; Savoie 2003, 2013). Recent concerns over “fake news,” filter bubbles, echo chambers and political bots also complicate the assumption that the Internet and enriched democracy necessarily move hand in hand (El-Bermawy 2016; Margetts 2017; McKelvey and Dubois 2017; Owen and Greenspon 2017). Even more dramatic social and economic shifts are on the near horizon as technologies such as artificial intelligence, automation, robotics, blockchain and algorithmic decision making hit the mainstream. These developments offer governments immense opportunities to produce more efficient and effective services and policies, and might prove crucial in the state's response to mounting social and economic challenges, such as aging societies and climate change that are already highlighting the limits of governments’ policy capacity. Yet, these emerging technologies, along with disruptive industries (evident in the so-called “sharing economy” of Uber and Airbnb) and disrupted industries (such as journalism and traditional cable television) also place new pressures on governments to develop regulatory responses at a rapid pace and with an agility typically lacking in large hierarchical organizations. Most advocates for the transformative potential of digital technology (for example, Tapscott and Williams 2008; Tapscott 1998, 2009, 2010), acknowledge that governments are generally (but not always) ill-equipped to embrace the opportunities of digital technologies relative to business, non-profits and citizens—compare online banking and web-based collective action with government services and public consultations, for example. To keep pace with and leverage an increasingly interconnected, tech-savvy citizenry and non-government actors experimenting with and adopting new technologies—and to account for dwindling fiscal resources in the wake of recent financial crises and mounting social challenges— the dominant thinking in the field calls for wholesale public management reforms. These reforms would see traditional process-heavy, hierarchical machine bureaucracies become more agile and innovative, and open to collaboration internally across previously siloed units of government, and externally, with different levels of government and non-government actors (O'Reilly 2011; Novek 2009, 2015; Margetts and Dunleavy 2013). Still others see an upcoming generation of citizens, political activists, elected officials and public servants operating with a new set of values and practices associated with the digital era – openness, collaboration, peer-production and entrepreneurialism, for instance. This new ethos will test traditional models of governance in Canada, but harnessing the potential of a new fleet of reform-oriented digital-era public servants and citizens may be necessary to ensure that governments embrace the opportunities and weather the challenges that governing in the digital age presents. Does Canada remain an exemplar? While Canada was seen as an international exemplar in the “e-government” movement of the late 1990s and early 2000s, and still remains in the top 25 of the United Nations E-Government Development Index, it is no longer seen as one of the very top performers (United Nations 2016; The Stratford Institute for Digital Media 2012). And outside these rankings, Canada is no longer the first source of inspiration globally for cutting-edge thinking on digital government. Instead, the United Kingdom's Government Digital Service, and its followers in Australia, the United States, and to its credit, Ontario, are praised for their embrace of user-centred design, agile methodology, for revamping Information Technology procurement and recruiting a fleet of technologists to the rank and file of government workforces. Estonia, New Zealand and Singapore have also leapfrogged early e-government leaders such as Canada, ushering in world-class digital services. With interest in the role of ICT in development, countries like Bangladesh are quickly becoming hotbeds of digital innovation. Playing catch up to these international trends, and responding to the disastrous Phoenix pay system failure, the federal government introduced a Canadian Digital Service in its 2017 budget. Yet, this effort alone will likely not suffice to update the federal government's service offerings at scale (Clarke 2017). Beyond the provision of public services, Canada equally appears a laggard in the domain of digitally-enabled citizen engagement. To be sure, there are pockets of innovation at the municipal level (cities such as Nanaimo and Edmonton were among the first to release open data) and the provincial level (for example, the Government of British Columbia's Citizen Engagement unit). Following these leaders, open data initiatives and official Open Government programs have cropped up in cities, provinces, and in the federal government. Canada is a member of the 70-member Open Government Partnership (Francoli 2014), and so is Ontario. But, Canada is not regarded globally as a first mover on Open Government, despite its early history as an Access to Information trendsetter, and alongside global interest in digital-era Open Government, the federal government in particular has been critiqued for backsliding on its transparency commitments (Legault 2015). Indeed, when discussing digital innovations in citizen engagement and democratic governance, it is countries like Iceland (which crowdsourced the first draft of its constitution) and Brazil (which has undertaken novel forms of online citizen engagement) that are frequently cited, not Canada. On the other hand, while not necessarily globally recognized as first-movers or as cutting-edge, many federal, provincial, municipal and First Nations governments are adopting digital technology to address their challenges, in some cases in potentially transformative ways. Outside government, organizations such as Code for Canada (set to work with the Ontario and federal governments in 2017), Open North, civic tech and open data communities are also leveraging digital technologies to engage citizens and solve social challenges, with the potential for impressive transformations to Canadian governance. The question remains, however, what this digital transformation consists of – its scale, relationship to previous and ongoing non-digital reforms and significance for Canadian democracy writ large are little understood. Most obviously, we might ask whether Canadian governments that on average lag behind the private sector, political parties, lobbying groups and individual citizens in adopting the technologies and worldviews defining the digital age retain their relevance, legitimacy and power in the digital age. And, despite deficiencies in some governance domains, Canadian governments have proven willing and able to embrace digital technologies to support secretive and largely unaccountable citizen surveillance undertaken in the name of national security, activities that compel us to question the rhetoric of democratic renewal and Open Government punctuating popular theories of digital-era governance in Canada and internationally (Roy 2016; Lindquist 2017). Canadian scholarship on governance in the digital era This collection is not the first foray into this changing landscape. Alexander and Pal (1998) took an early look at the implications of digital technology for Canadian democracy, and Allen et al (2001) considered the early experience of the Canadian government with its “Government Online” initiative. Roy (2006) examined the emergence of e-government in Canada while Borins et al.'s (2007) Digital State at the Leading Edge collection provided a wide-ranging look at different functions and leadership pertaining to information management and public administration. Dutil et al.'s (2010) The Service State offered critical perspectives on new possibilities and quandaries for service delivery in the digital age. McNutt (2009) explored online consultation as a means for citizen engagement, and Roy's (2008) “Beyond Westminster governance” examined the tensions between Westminster and digital-network values. While some broached how digital technology might facilitate new governance possibilities (for example, Bourgon 2011), others have considered the darker side of the New Political Governance with prime ministers and governments using new digital tools to assert control over government communications and micro-target campaigns (Aucoin 2012; Bakvis and Jarvis 2012; Marland 2016). Recent research has focused on the uses and effects of new digital policy instruments, with several articles appearing in Canadian Public Administration. Examples include McNutt (2012) on the web presence of government agencies, McNutt (2014) on the implications of social media for government, Brown (2013) on the implications of new technology for administrative services and central agencies in government as well as for accountability, Glenn (2014) on the modernization of the communications function in different levels of Canadian government, Roy (2008) on mobile technologies, Dutil (2015) on crowd-sourcing, and Kernaghan (2013, 2014a, 2014b) variously on managing channel management, and the ethical dimensions of digital technology and robotics. Work by Canadian scholars published elsewhere includes Clarke (2014) and Clarke and Margetts (2014) exploring different aspects of Open Government, big data and public management reform, Craft (2014) probing the rhetoric and practice with the “open government” movement, Bennett and Lyon (2008) and Bennett et al. (2014) on the ever-broadening reach of surveillance of citizens, and Lindquist (2015) on visualization traditions and policy development. This is only a sampling of the work done by Canadian public administration scholars. It does not reflect the reports of government, think tanks, and other specialist contributions (but see Flumian [2009a, 2009b] and Johal, Galley, and Molson 2014 for a good survey of the new possibilities for digital-era public administration). But even a quick tour of the Canadian public administration literature shows that it is difficult to cut through the hype to get an accurate picture of what digitization means for the quality, shape and directions of governments and governance: the research has diverse points of departure and focuses on distinct issues and trends, offering little in the way of an integrating framework to put particular tools and progress in certain domains in perspective. Part of the challenge is trying to concretely assess how governance practice has evolved, which requires taking into account actors inside and outside government, across sectors and across levels of government, including provincial, local and Indigenous communities.1 Another part of the challenge is that the nomenclature introduced with the digital era excites interest but often obfuscates at the same time. What is one to make of Open Government, open data, social media, and crowd-sourcing when government and big firms can seem less accountable and more closed than ever? A third element of the challenge is that there are so many different domains and issues at play when discussing digital-era governance. Practitioners and researchers cannot ignore the minutiae of these varied phenomenon, and must grapple with more specific questions about how digital technology can/is affecting distinct spheres of government work (policy design, citizen engagement, service delivery, regulation, back-room functions such as information management and information technology, accountability, etc.). Compounding this complexity, progress in these areas varies by department, policy issue and level of government. But alongside these focused domain-specific studies, we still require answers to broad questions about the trajectory and evolution of Canadian governance – particularly the Westminster model of the federal and provincial governments – and the state of Canadian democracy. To advance thinking in the field and connect the Canadian experience with active international debates on digital-era governance, we need more Canadian public administration scholars “on the case” with richer linkages to specialists in related disciplines and professions, such as computer and data sciences, information and library sciences, communications, design and visual practice, behavioural economics, and foresight. This conversation must also be pan-Canadian and inter-jurisdictional, in particular acknowledging that a networked digital age makes possible and in many cases will necessitate networked jurisdictional solutions. Linking up data, policy making, service delivery and governance structures across Canada's linguistically, geographically and ethnically diverse federal and First Nations' system of government represents both a complex challenge and a significant opportunity that might render the “Canadian experience” an exemplar (or source of cautionary tales) internationally. Arguably the pressures now felt and promised by digital technologies are similar in reach, scope and disruptive potential as those which led to the Royal Commission on Economic Union and Development Prospects (1982-85). There is no chance that a government will establish a similar commission, but we need a cross-Canada conversation among scholars, practitioners and citizens to appraise the quality of the system of governance and its constituent institutions and practices that we have brought into the digital age, and to construct the system of governance, institutions and practices that take advantage and make the most of what digital tools can offer; indeed, these tools have already changed the way many parts of government work, altered the expectations citizens have of governments, and can reinforce or skew governance in favour of certain interests inside and outside government. Getting started: an overview Acknowledging the need for a national conversation on Canadian digital-era governance, in 2014 a group of scholars working across universities, federal and provincial governments, non-profit and private sector institutions and the Institute on Governance joined to launch a multi-year research and engagement agenda, funded through a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Partnership Development Grant. This special issue of Canadian Public Administration grew out of this grant and the Digital Governance Partnership it has fuelled. The collection is comprised of nine papers which explore the potential and challenges of digital-era tools and approaches in diverse domains of Canadian governance. The goal was to assess the state of the Canadian literature, to ascertain if the digital age is producing fundamental challenges or opportunities for governments in those diverse domains, and whether these new developments and possibilities are genuinely new or are a continuation of enduring themes of Canadian public administration. Most importantly, we sought to identify a program of research that could inform a national conversation on Canadian governance in the digital age, looking across governments to how they intersect with other sectors and citizens. While intrigued by digital tools, we endeavoured not to be dazzled by them, recognizing that like all technologies there are upsides and downsides to their adoption, and technologies can variously transform or reinforce existing patterns of governance and public administration. The first three papers explore different aspects of policy development. In “The Vestiges and Vanguards of Policy Design in a Digital Context,” Amanda Clarke and Jonathan Craft consider how digital tools expand and affect not only the existing tool-kit of policy instruments, but also the process of developing policy and the resulting policy mixes. Raising their sights from policy design per se, Dylan Marando and Jonathan Craft consider how the act of advising ministers is changing in their article “Digital Era Policy Advising: Clouding Ministerial Perspectives.”^ Taking a broader look at how advising and engagement have evolved, Justin Longo considers examples of how governments have adjusted in their use of engagement tools and strategies to seek advice in “Citizen and Stakeholder Engagement into the Digital Era: From Spicer to #Hashtags.” Not surprisingly there are overlaps in these perspectives, but together they reveal an exciting range of possibilities, tensions and dilemmas for governments. The next three papers address several “conventional” areas of public administration that are no less affected by possibilities and developments of the digital era. Based on many years observing e-government, Jeffrey Roy takes stock of how digital tools have intersected with successive public sector reform movements in “Digital Government and Service Delivery: An Examination of Performance and Prospects.” Unlike service delivery, which has received a considerable amount of attention by Canadian scholars, Patrice Dutil and Julie Williams in “Regulation Governance in the Digital Era: A New Research Agenda” provide a panoramic view of a governance domain side-swiped by digital transformations, and where scholarship has failed to keep up. Similarly, in “Information Governance in Digitized Public Administration,” David Brown and Sandra Toze consider the many challenges confronting the Information Management (IM) functions in government, which not only must keep up with never-ending software and platform technological change alongside an explosion of information production, but also must support all the other functions of government which are increasingly shaped by IM capacity in the public service. The final three papers offer broader perspectives. In “Canadian Governance in Transition: Multilevel Governance in the Digital Era,” Davide Cargnello and Maryantonett Flumian consider the challenges the digital age presents to all governments in Canada, depicting governments as part of distributed governance systems, and exploring the implications for serving and engaging citizens in new ways. In “Accountability and Monitoring Government in the Digital Era: Promise, Realism and Research for Digital-Era Governance in Canada,” Evert Lindquist and Irene Huse survey how different streams of research, variously centered on digital technologies or on the state of public administration and governance, have started to converge and point to the need for research on new forms of interactive, dynamic, and citizen-initiated accountability in continuous real-time environments. Given the scope of these papers, we need an overarching view of how these developments work together and where they might take governments and democratic governance in the future. Answering this call, in the final paper, Peter Jones introduces us to foresight methods and sensibilities in “The Futures of Canadian Governance: Foresight Competencies for Public Administration in the Digital Era,” which we believe to be an apt way to conclude this collection of primarily exploratory, agenda-setting papers. Each paper offers panoramic views of possibilities and the literature in their respective domains. It is daunting to look across these domains and consider what they mean for the future of government and governance in Canada. They point to the need for a large systematic program of empirical research on how governments have been evolving and where governance might go as our societies experience rapid changes in the digital age. This is a big task, which is why we have established the Digital Government Partnership. Building on the Partnership's work so far, this collection of papers intends to kick-start a much-needed conversation on the present state and future possibilities for Canadian digital-era governance. Comprendre la gouvernance à l’ère numérique : Étude théorique canadienne pour l'administration publique Perturbations et possibilités numériques Quelles sont les répercussions des technologies numériques sur la gouvernance démocratique au Canada, et de quelles manières l’âge numérique peut-il renforcer ou saper nos institutions publiques et la capacité collective de résolution de problèmes dans les années à venir? Les gouvernements sont maintenant confrontés à de nouvelles façons d'adapter et de fournir les services aux citoyens, peuvent utiliser les médias sociaux pour diffuser l'information et mobiliser ou corrompre le soutien, ainsi qu'avoir accès à des plateformes collaboratives afin de faciliter l'externalisation ouverte au sein et à l'extérieur du gouvernement. Les gouvernements sont aussi en mesure de tirer parti de nouveaux courants de preuves pour diriger les interventions de politiques; et ceci non seulement à partir de « mégadonnées » produites par les opérations administratives internes et les activités numériques des citoyens et des gouvernements, mais aussi par des laboratoires d'innovation, des hackathons et des progrès de réflexion dans les sciences sociales, comme en témoigne l'intérêt mondial en « petit coup de coude » et en économies comportementales. Parallèlement, alors que l’âge numérique fournit des quantités de données et d'information sans précédent tourbillonnant dans nos sociétés, nous sommes confrontés à de nouveaux équilibres de pouvoir et de contrôle qui sont définis par une capacité inégale d'interpréter et de manipuler les flux de données numériques. En outre, Clarke et Francoli (2017) distinguent une tension existant entre l'enthousiasme populaire pour la gouvernance de l’ère numérique, et les observations faites dans la littérature sur l'administration publique canadienne, qui formulent l’âge numérique et son rythme effréné d’échange d'information comme un impératif de politique à court terme, de contrôle d'information et une politisation du service public (voir Marland, Giasson, et Esselment 2017; Marland 2016; Savoie 2003, 2013). Les récentes préoccupations concernant les « fausses informations », les bulles de filtres, les caisses de résonance et les robots politiques compliquent aussi l'hypothèse qu'Internet et l'enrichissement de la démocratie vont de pair (El-Bermawy 2016; Margetts 2017; McKelvey et Dubois 2017; Owen et Greenspon 2017). Des changements sociaux et économiques encore plus spectaculaires se profilent dans un futur proche, alors que des technologies comme l'intelligence artificielle, la robotique, les chaînes de blocs et la prise de décision algorithmique touchent le grand public. Pour les gouvernements, ces développements offrent d’énormes possibilités pour fournir des services et politiques plus efficaces et efficients, et pourraient s'avérer décisifs dans la réponse de l’État aux défis sociaux et économiques croissants, tels que le vieillissement de la population et le changement climatique qui soulignent déjà les limites des gouvernements en matière de capacité d’élaboration des politiques. Néanmoins, ces technologies émergentes, ainsi que les industries perturbatrices (dont fait preuve la soi-disant « économie de partage » d'Uber et AirBnB) et les industries perturbées (telles que le journalisme et la câblodistribution traditionnelle) exercent aussi de nouvelles pressions sur les gouvernements pour élaborer de nouvelles interventions réglementaires avec rapidité et avec une agilité qui fait généralement défaut dans les grandes organisations hiérarchiques. La plupart des défenseurs du potentiel d’évolution attribué à la technologie numérique (p. ex. Tapscott et Williams 2008; Tapscott 1998, 2009, 2010), reconnaissent que les gouvernements sont généralement (mais pas toujours) mal équipés pour saisir les occasions présentées par les technologies numériques concernant les affaires, les organismes à but non lucratif et les citoyens – à comparer par exemple, la banque en ligne et les actions collectives sur le Web avec les services gouvernementaux et les consultations publiques. Afin de suivre et de miser sur des citoyens et des intervenants non gouvernementaux de plus en plus interconnectés, experts en technologie et qui adoptent les nouvelles technologies – tout en tenant compte des ressources monétaires en baisse découlant des récentes crises financières, et des défis sociaux croissants – les idées dominantes dans le domaine en appellent à des réformes généralisées du management public. Ces réformes tendraient à transformer les bureaucraties hiérarchiques traditionnelles aux procédures lourdes afin qu'elles deviennent plus agiles et novatrices, ouvertes à la collaboration à l'interne par le biais d'unités gouvernementales préalablement cloisonnées et, à l'externe, par le biais d'intervenants gouvernementaux et non gouvernementaux à différents paliers (O'Reilly 2011; Noveck 2009, 2015; Margetts et Dunleavy 2013). D'autres voient encore une nouvelle génération de citoyens, de militants politiques, d’élus et de fonctionnaires œuvrant avec un nouvel ensemble de valeurs et de pratiques liées à l’ère numérique : par exemple, ouverture, collaboration, production collaborative et esprit d'entreprise. Bien que cette nouvelle éthique mette à l’épreuve les modèles traditionnels de gouvernance au Canada, il pourrait être nécessaire d'exploiter le potentiel d'un nouveau groupe de fonctionnaires et de citoyens axés sur la réforme de l’ère numérique, cela afin d'assurer que les gouvernements saisissent les occasions et surmontent les défis que la gouvernance présente à l’âge numérique. Le Canada reste-t-il une référence? Alors que le Canada était considéré comme un exemple de référence international lors du mouvement du « cybergouvernement » à la fin des années 1990 et au début des années 2000, et qu'il reste toujours parmi les 25 premiers sur l'Index de développement de l'E-gouvernement des Nations Unies, il n'est plus perçu comme l'un des plus performants (United Nations 2016; Stratford Initiative 2012). En dehors de ces classements, le Canada n'est plus la première source d'inspiration du gouvernement numérique de pointe sur le plan mondial. En revanche, le Government Digital Service du Royaume-Uni et ses adeptes en Australie, aux États-Unis, et c'est tout à son honneur, en Ontario, sont couverts d’éloges pour avoir adopté un concept axé sur l'utilisateur, une méthodologie agile, pour moderniser l'approvisionnement en technologies de l'information et pour recruter des groupes de technologues dans le personnel de base des effectifs gouvernementaux. L'Estonie, la Nouvelle-Zélande et Singapour sont aussi passés par-dessus les leaders du cybergouvernement de la première heure comme le Canada, en inaugurant des services numériques de classe internationale. Intéressés par le rôle des TIC pour le développement, des pays comme le Bangladesh sont rapidement en train de devenir des foyers de l'innovation numérique. Pour essayer de rattraper ces tendances internationales, et en réponse à l’échec désastreux du système de paie Phénix, le gouvernement fédéral a introduit un Service Numérique Canadien d
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