Mid Sweden University

The term eGovernance has been used for almost 2 decades and suggests a relationship between some electronic - or digital - aspects and governance in a traditional form. Several scholars have pointed out that eGovernance has been defined and used in a number of ways in the academic discourse. This is problematic as it may hinder the development of cumulative knowledge and robust theoretical constructs. To investigate how eGovernance has been used and understood, we reviewed the eGovernance and digital governance literature to identify the theoretical foundations and to understand variations in the use of the term. Our overall objective was to contribute to a consolidation of the understanding and use of the term. This chapter suggests that there is considerable variation in how eGovernance is understood and applied in the literature. Recently, some argued that eGovernance has evolved into the term "digital governance" though there seem to be more theoretical contributions related to the concept of eGovernance and the digital aspect of digital governance has been slightly more elaborated, we found no clear conceptual distinctions between the two concepts and used digital governance for our conceptualization. To provide clarity, we posit that governance and digital are basic elements of digital governance. Further, we found that digital governance is typically either studied with emphasis on the use of ICT in governance or on structural or normative transformational outcomes of digital governance. As a novel contribution, we suggest a definition of digital governance.

The world is facing global challenges that require international collaboration. This study aims to describe and analyze how digital technologies are applied in global governance to respond to such critical challenges.

The authors apply an interpretive case study of climate reporting to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) as a case of digitalization in global governance. It includes interviews with officials in the Swedish public administration and the UNFCCC secretariat to cover national and international levels. The authors describe the reporting process and analyze the role of information systems through the lens of information infrastructures. 

“Information infrastructure” is a valuable instrument to understand digitalization in global governance as a complex interplay between information systems, information, standards, organizations, people and social structures. The level of sophistication is, however, basic with a large potential for improvement – for instance in analytical and communicative services to support evidence-based decision-making and assessment of progress. 

The data collection is limited to one governance process: reporting. Future studies should complement the findings by broadening the scope to other processes. The authors propose that digital global governance is dependent on an effective information infrastructure, and that the five design principles by Hanseth and Lyytinen (2016) offer guidance when developing this. 

The results indicate a large unutilized potential of digital technologies to improve progress assessment, communicate more effectively with stakeholders and identify new ways of visualizing data to support decision making in global climate policy. 

Use of digital technologies, as suggested in the article, could strengthen the implementation capability of climate goals, which is of urgent need. 

While most research in digital governance considers the national or municipal level, this study provides empirical insight and theorization of digital technologies in a global governance setting.

The world is facing global challenges, which has led to international policy development such as the Paris Agreement (the United Nations climate agreement). An important element of the Paris Agreement is reporting. As digital technologies are used in reporting, this can be considered a case of digital global governance. Surprisingly, the global dimension of digital governance has received little attention from the academic community. Thus, theoretical and empirical understanding of digital global governance and how it responds to global challenges is needed. To address this, climate reporting to the United Nations, with Sweden as a case, has been studied. Reporting was chosen because of the significant role of embedded IT artefacts. Empirical data was analyzed with the lens of affordance theory. Findings suggest that IT artefacts and information in the reporting have affordances that enables monitoring, transparency, implementation of agreement, coordination & collaboration, analysis & visualization, and re-use of information.

An increasing emphasis on data driven and evidence-based policy making gives information and information systems a key role in governance processes. It is also argued that digital governance can support the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). A number of grand challenges, such as climate change, need to be addressed at an international level. In climate governance, reporting has a central role to monitor progress, both under the Paris Agreement at a global level, and within the European Union (EU). Within the EU, reporting is also used to assess implementation and compliance with EU regulations. This paper is based on an interpretive study of the e-reporting platform, Reportnet, which is used to manage climate reporting within the EU. Affordance theory is applied as an analytical lens to uncover the possibilities of e-reporting in a supranational context. Our study identified six key affordances in the areas of submission of reports, quality controls, compliance, monitoring, transparency and communication and visualization. The study also suggests that an important area for improvement is to make the reported information more usable, particularly in further policy processes.

Digital technologies are increasingly used to support governance at the global level. However, the global level has received very little attention in digital governance research. Global governance differs from national governance contexts in that it does not have a central government with authority of enforcing decisions. Consequently, as engagement of stakeholders is vital for taking appropriate action, possibilities and challenges in using digital technologies to facilitate response to common challenges should be further investigated. To address this shortcoming, we explore how digital technologies and online communities can leverage participation and co-production in the context of global governance. Based on an existing classification of online interaction (sharing, cooperation, collective action) we suggest a research agenda that can move the knowledge front related to online interactions in global governance contexts.