Government Information Quarterly 33 (2016) 603–613
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Government Information Quarterly journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/govinf
Editorial
Implementing Sustainable Development Goals with Digital Government – Aspiration-capacity gap Tomasz Janowski Faculty of Management and Economics, Gdańsk University of Technology, ul. Traugutta 79, 80-233 Gdańsk, Poland Faculty of Business and Globalization, Danube University Krems, Dr. Karl Dorrek Straße 30, 3500 Krems, Austria
a r t i c l e
i n f o
Keywords: Public administration Public governance Development management Digital technology Digital Government Digital Government Evolution Digital Government capacity Sustainable Development Goals
a b s t r a c t Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) represent a commitment by all United Nations Member States to pursue development efforts, including ending poverty and hunger, promoting well-being and education, reducing inequalities, fostering peace, and protecting the planet. Member States and their governments are supposed to take ownership of the SDGs, strengthen the implementation means, and improve public governance as both the means and the end to development. Their capacity to undertake these tasks is critical for implementing SDGs. This editorial develops three lines of arguments: 1) that the Member States should strengthen the SDG implementation by building Digital Government capacity; 2) that according to the Digitization, Transformation, Engagement and Contextualization stages of the Digital Government Evolution model, 87% of the 169 SDG targets require Digital Government capacity at the highest Contextualization stage; and 3) that less than 31% of the Member States reached this stage and 55% did not advance beyond the lowest Digitization stage. The editorial concludes that Digital Government should play a key role in the implementation of the SDGs but, at present, the gap between aspiration (SDGs) and capacity (Digital Government) is affecting more than 69% of the Member States. Understanding and eventually addressing this gap requires further research efforts and adaptation of research results to different national circumstances and policy contexts. © 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction Approved by the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) as part of the September 2015 Resolution A/RES/70/1 “Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development” (UNGA, 2015), Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are an outcome of the intergovernmental process initiated at the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio de Janeiro in June 2012 (UNGA, 2012). The goals were proposed by the UNGA's Open Working Group, which includes representation from 70 countries. The proposal followed and complemented various initiatives undertaken by the United Nations (UN) Secretary-General, such as the UN System Task Team on the Post-2015 UN Development Agenda (UNSTT, 2012) or the HighLevel Panel on the Post-2015 Development Agenda (HLP, 2013); by the United Nations Development Group – a consortium of UN agencies created to enhance the performance of development activities on the national level, which organized 88 national consultations, 11 thematic consultations, global online conversation www.worldwewant2015.org and the online survey www.myworld2015.org (UNDG, 2013); and by other contributors such as the Sustainable Development Solutions Network – a network of scientists and development practitioners (SDSN, 2014) or the UN Global Compact (UNGC, 2013). E-mail address:
[email protected].
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.giq.2016.12.001 0740-624X/© 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Part of the process described above is learning from the strengths and weaknesses of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) framework (UNGA, 2000), to which the SDGs framework serves as a natural continuation and upgrade. This learning resulted in sharply different design decisions for both frameworks, as shown in Table 1. In particular, SDGs have a strong focus on the means of implementation (Risse, 2016), which include: finance, capacity building, trade, policy, institutional coherence, multi-stakeholder partnerships, data, monitoring and accountability, as well as public governance and technology (UNGA, 2015, p. 25-27). A number of targets under SDG16 “Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels” (UNGA, 2015, p. 25) and SDG17 “Strengthen the means of implementation and revitalize the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development” (UNGA, 2015, p. 26) focus directly on the means of implementation. They “are key to realizing our Agenda and are of equal importance with the other Goals and targets” (UNGA, 2015, p. 28). In addition to the means of implementation targets, the SDG framework also extends the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development first established under the MDGs framework to include national and local authorities, the private sector, civil society, academia, etc. The framework also emphasizes national planning and regular progress reviews on the national level, complemented by voluntary reviews through the High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable
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Development (HLPF) – a central platform for overseeing the follow up and review of SDGs on the global level under the auspices of the UNGA and the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) (UNGA, 2015, p. 11). According to the latest HLPF review, many countries “nationalized” “targets for the 2030 Agenda in their national strategies and plans, including financing strategies and institutional mechanisms” (ECOSOC, 2016, p. 3). This article focuses on public governance and digital technology as key implementation means for SDGs. Following the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), by public governance we mean “formal and informal arrangements that determine how public decisions are made and how public actions are carried out” (OECD, 2011, p. 2). The synthesis of 60 national reports submitted to the 2012 UN Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, pointed out that “Strengthening institutions and governance systems and building capacities for collaboration and coordination at all levels” (UNDESA and UNDP, 2012, p. 5) is one of the key priorities for advancing sustainable development. Public governance as implementation means is covered under the entire SDG16 including the target 16.6 “Develop effective, accountable and transparent institutions at all levels” (UNGA, 2015, p. 25). Technology is present throughout the SDG portfolio, with 14 targets covering the issues of access, performance improvements and innovation support, including three technology-specific targets under SDG17 (UN, 2016). According to the Global Sustainable Development Report 2016, “Understanding the role of technology for SDGs is critical because technology has greatly shaped society, economy and environment and vice versa. In fact, technology, society and institutions co-evolve. Hence, technology progress requires institutional adaptations and may be constrained by social issues” (UN, 2016, p. 16). Such socially-sensitive “institutional adaptations” are anticipated in the Digital Government Evolution model (Janowski, 2015). Given the recognition that public governance, digital technology and technology-enabled public governance are important means for SDG implementation, the main research question addressed in this article is “Is the Member States' Digital Government capacity sufficient to support their efforts aimed at implementing SDGs?”. We address this question in terms of three sub-questions: 1. Relevance Question – “Is Digital Government capacity relevant for the Member States' efforts aimed at implementing SDGs?”. In order to answer to this question we recall two sets of evidences: from the MDGs process that the root cause of many development failures is the failure of governance, e.g. violations of the rule of law, unsound public policies or mismanagement of public administrations (Millennium Project, 2006); and from the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) that technology, structured along different WSIS action lines, can support the achievement of the entire portfolio of the SDGs and their targets (WSIS, 2014). In particular, one of the WSIS action lines – C7 “ICT Applications” includes the applications of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in public governance. 2. Aspiration Question – “What is the adequate level of the Member States' Digital Government capacity to support their efforts aimed at implementing SDGs?”. In order to answer this question we apply four stages proposed by the Digital Government evolution model – Digitization, Transformation, Engagement and Contextualization (Janowski, 2015) to determine the levels of Digital Government support required for different SDGs and their targets. The mapping exercise matches the logical characterization of different stages (Janowski, 2015) against the formulation of the SDGs and their targets (UNGA, 2015). The results are expressed in terms of percentages of targets requiring Digital Government capacity at different stages of the Digital Government evolution.
3. Capacity Question – “What are the current levels of the Member States' Digital Government capacity to support their efforts aimed at implementing SDGs?”. To answer this question we rely on the latest edition of the United Nations e-Government Survey (UNDESA, 2016b), particularly its Online Service Index and e-Participation Index, to assess the levels of Digital Government capacity reached by the Member States according to the Digital Government evolution model. The Online Service Index is used as a proxy measure to establish which of the Member States reached the Transformation stage, while the e-Participation Index is used to establish which of the Member States reached the Engagement stage. The results are expressed in terms of percentages of the Member States that reached different stages of the Digital Government evolution. In conclusion, the answer to the main research question relies upon the answers to the three sub-questions. The answer is expressed in terms of percentage of the Member States that reached the level of Digital Government capacity required for implementing SDGs. In addition, for those Member States that did not reach the required level, the answer also includes the gap between the current and the required levels. The remainder of this article is organized as follows. Section 2 is the background section; it explores connections between SDGs and Digital Government. Section 3 is the theory section; it presents the Digital Government Evolution model as theoretical framework for the analysis conducted in this article. Section 4 is the methodology section; it explains research questions and methodological decisions on how these questions were addressed. Section 5 is the findings section; it presents the findings of the analysis for each of the research sub-questions including relevance (Section 5.1), aspiration (Section 5.2), capacity (Section 5.3) and aspiration-capacity gap (Section 5.4). The final Section 6 outlines conclusions and limitations of this research, and explains significance of the findings presented in this article. 2. Background: SDGs and Digital Government An implicit goal of this article is to answer the auxiliary question “What is the state of research and policy literature on the connection between SDGs and Digital Government?”. The answer is that the literature concerning this connection is missing. In view of this, we examine below relevant writings on interconnections between SDGs and public governance, between SDGs and digital technology, and generally between sustainable development and Digital Government. We also plea for more focused research in this important area. The recognition of the importance of governance and institutions to the sustainable development agenda is one of the key features of the SDGs framework, with one of the goals (SDG16) entirely devoted to this topic. SDG16 covers a wide space of issues including: reducing violence (targets 16.1 and 16.2); protecting the rule of law and providing access to justice (target 16.3); combating organized crime (target 16.4); fighting corruption (target 16.5); building effective, transparent and accountable institutions (target 16.6); practicing inclusive and participatory decision-making (target 16.7); ensuring participation of developing countries in the institutions of global governance (target 16.8); providing access to information (target 16.10); and adopting non-discriminatory laws and policies for sustainable development (target 16.b). SDG16 represents an ideal of an effective, accountable, responsive, inclusive and participatory public governance. As such, it is both a goal in itself and an implementation means for other goals. Digital technology or Digital Government are not directly mentioned under any of the SDG16 targets but extensive literature exists concerning technology impact on the issues covered by the goal: police website support to victims of domestic violence (Westbrook, 2008) for targets 16.1 and 16.2; protection of the rule of law in digitized government (Kennedy & Scholl, 2016) for target 16.3; detecting fraud and other organized crime activities in ICT services (Kim, Lim, & Nah, 2013) for target 16.4; using e-government to curb corruption in government (Kim, 2014) for target 16.5; e-government impacting cultural attitudes about
Editorial Table 1 Contrasting design decisions for the MDGs and SDGs frameworks. MDGs
SDGs
MDGs focus on developing countries.
SDGs “involve the entire world, developed and developing countries alike” (UNGA, 2015, p. 3). SDGs set out “a wide range of social, economic and environmental objectives” (UNGA, 2015, p. 6). SDGs address root causes of poverty. SDGs “take into account different national realities, capacities and levels of development” (UNGA, 2015, p. 31). SDGs rely on the Member States' ownership of the process and outcomes. SDGs focus on the goals and the means of achieving them.
MDGs focus on selected number of high-priority goals. MDGs address poverty directly. MDGs apply a unified view on development circumstances. MDGs follow global negotiation of intergovernmental agreements. MDGs focus on the goals to be achieved.
transparency (Bertot, Jaeger, & Grimes, 2010) for target 16.6; influencing government decision-making through e-participation (Kim & Lee, 2012) for target 16.7; policy and power in the governance of global electronic networks (Drake & Wilson, 2008) for target 16.8; protecting freedom of expression on the Internet (Dutton, Dopatka, Hills, Law, & Nash, 2011) for target 16.10; and assessing compliance of e-government websites with disability discrimination laws (Kuzma, 2010) for target 16.b. A comprehensive exercise aimed at establishing the state of research on Electronic Governance for Sustainable Development (EGOV4SD) is documented in (Estevez & Janowski, 2013). The findings include that such research “pursues a clear multi-disciplinary approach” (Estevez & Janowski, 2013, p. S103), but most studies are conducted within the contributing domains. For example, “the problem of designing public services based on the customer needs … studied within the EGOV domain or the problem of developing sustainable communities studied within the SD domain” (Estevez & Janowski, 2013, p. S102). The authors also indicate an approach to formulating inter-disciplinary research problems in this area, by starting with the EGOV perspective and then applying one of the SD principles. For example, transforming “the EGOV problem of designing public services based on the customer needs into the EGOV4SD problem by addressing such services to vulnerable groups” (Estevez & Janowski, 2013, p. S102) or transforming “the SD problem of developing sustainable communities into the EGOV4SD problem to support such communities through participatory planning and governance” (Estevez & Janowski, 2013, p. S103). Based on 417 identified and 81 analyzed research papers covering various combinations of governance, technology and sustainable development domains, Estevez & Janowski, (2013) also determined typical problems addressed within the EGOV4SD research. Table 2 provides examples of such research problems while also mapping them into specific SDG targets. For example, addressing the research problem “Delivering public services particularly to vulnerable groups” (Estevez & Janowski, 2013, p. S102) would help utilize Digital Government at the service of the target 1.4 “By 2030, ensure that all men and women, in particular the poor and the vulnerable, have equal rights to economic resources, as well as access to basic services…” (UNGA, 2015, p. 15). The analysis of ten EGOV4SD case studies identified the most common SD objectives: empowerment (social), business development (economic), man-made activities (environmental) and capacitybuilding (institutional) (Estevez, Janowski, & Dzhusupova, 2013). The analysis also confirmed different nature of such initiatives in developing versus developed countries. Unlike governance and SDG16, technology does not have a dedicated goal in the SDGs agenda, but a number of targets spread across the entire SDGs portfolio. Among them, four targets include direct references to “information and communication technology”, i.e. 4.b, 5.b, 9.c and 17.8, including three targets that treat digital technology as an enabler and one as a goal, i.e. 9.c. Table 3 presents a list of 19
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technology-relevant targets. The column “EXPLICIT?” indicates whether ICT is explicitly mentioned in the target. The targets that do not mention “information and communication technology” explicitly still require digital technology to support other technological developments. The column “ROLE” indicates whether digital technology is a goal in itself, an enabler to achieve other goals, or a support tool for other technological developments. Thus, among 169 SDG targets only one considers digital technology as a goal. This reflects another difference between public governance and digital technology in the SDGs agenda: governance is both a goal and implementation means, whereas technology is by large the implementation means only. The SDGs agenda has been criticized for: having too many goals and targets, problematic target setting, preoccupation with absolute rather than relative poverty, goals and targets representing the interests of those organizations that drive the agenda, promoting the growth of the development industry through progress monitoring requirements, and reflecting a relatively small set of interests (Unwin, 2015). Most importantly, despite “widespread agreement that ICTs have been one of the major factors that have transformed the world over the 15 years of the MDGs” (Unwin, 2015, p. 2) the agenda is criticized for lack of sufficient focus on ICTs. While the WSIS process produced a mapping between the WSIS action lines and SDGs (WSIS, 2014) but that fails “to tackle the deep structural issues that mean that ICTs are continuing to contribute to greater global inequality” (Unwin, 2015, p. 4). Contrary views point out that the limited presence of ICTs in the SDGs agenda is protecting the former from setting unrealistic expectations concerning its abilities to generate concrete development outcomes (Heeks, 2016). Second, that the low profile of ICTs among SDGs highlights its “embeddedness and pervasiveness … within a progressively digital society” (Heeks, 2016, p. 1) and, consequently, that “not only are ICTs now seen as instrumental, they have become a platform through which development activities are increasingly mediated” (Heeks, 2016, p. 1). 3. Theoretical Framework: Digital Government Evolution In order to establish the relationship between Digital Government and SDGs, we apply the Digital Government Evolution model (Janowski, 2015) as theoretical framework. The reason for selecting this model is that it explicitly captures connection between progress in Digital Government and the impact of Digital Government on development. We are not aware of any other Digital Government maturity/ evolution model with this feature. This section presents the framework in the form that it can be applied in the latter sections. The model comprises a series of four evolutionary stages, logical characterization of the four stages, and the cause-effect framework to explain the stages and their progression. The four stages – Digitization, Transformation, Engagement and Contextualization – represent the evolution of the concept and practice of Digital Government whereby certain restrictions applied in earlier stages of the model are gradually removed in later stages: 1. Digitization represents a process of digitizing and automating the operations of a government organization, but without fundamentally improving or reforming such operations. 2. Transformation represents a process of reforming the internal operations and structures of government organizations or the entire public administration systems, relying on the outcome of the Digitization stage for individual organizations in this system, but without affecting external government stakeholders. 3. Engagement represents a process of transforming the relationships between the entire public administration systems and citizens, businesses and other non-state entities, relying on the outcomes of the Digitization and Transformation stages for such systems, but without improving development conditions for such entities.
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4. Contextualization represents a process of improving development conditions for citizens, businesses and other non-state entities residing in a given national, local or sectoral context, relying upon the outcomes of the Digitization and Transformation stages of the public administration system with official jurisdiction over this context as well as Engagement between such system and the entities. Table 4 depicts the four stages and provides their logical characterization in terms of three binary variables. For a set of non-state entities – citizens, businesses, etc. and a public administration system with jurisdiction over these entities, the variables: 1) determine the presence of transformation of this public administration system; 2) determine whether such transformation affects relationships between the system and the entities; and 3) determine whether the transformation is sensitive to the development conditions of the entities under its jurisdiction. For each variable, we also delineate where the impact from Digital Government is expected: impact on government for variable 1, impact on governance for variable 2 and impact on development for variable 3. The last element of the Digital Government Evolution model is the cause-effect framework. The framework explains the stages and their progression considering: the pressures on public administration systems; how public administration responds to such pressures using digital technologies available at a time; how they innovate their operations, processes, services, policies and structures through such technologies; and how the innovations are institutionalized over time, becoming part of the regular public administration practice. This cause-effect perspective is relevant for the SDGs implementation, as such implementation constitutes a pressure on the Member States' public administration systems, which respond to this pressure by building their Digital Government capacity through technology, innovation and institutionalization. The framework is instantiated to different stages. For example, better integration of public administration is a typical pressure at the Transformation stage. One response, enabled by open data standards, workflow management and other middleware technologies, is innovation based on technical and organizational interoperability. In turn, such innovations are institutionalized by realizing the whole-ofgovernment paradigm. Fig. 1 depicts the cause-effect framework with the example from the Transformation stage. 4. Research Methodology Following the formulation and decomposition of the main research question into three sub-questions in Section 1, the research methodology is defined to individually answer each sub-question. To answer the Relevance Question, we independently examine pub-
Table 2 EGOV4SD research areas (Estevez & Janowski, 2013) and SDG targets.
NO 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11
EGOV4SD research problems (Estevez & Janowski, 2013)
SDG targets (UNGA, 2015)
Delivering public services particularly to vulnerable groups Delivering basic services – water, electricity, housing and waste management Providing access and reducing digital divide Developing infrastructure Promoting governance at the local, regional, national and international levels Assessing community needs to determine areas for policy intervention Prioritizing and raising awareness about environmental issues Promoting innovation Planning urban systems Creating value Monitoring and enforcing regulations
1.4, 3.8, 5.4, 11.1 6.1, 7.1, 11.1, 11.6 1.4, 9.c, 16.10 2.a, 5.4, 7.a, 9.1, 9.a 16.3, 16.7, 16.8 1.b, 12.c, 13.b, 15.c 12.8, 13.3 8.3, 9.5, 9.b, 17.6 11.3, 11.a 2.3, 8.2, 9.3 10.5, 14.4
lic governance and digital technology as two key components of Digital Government, and their relevance to SDGs. The former recalls the evidence from the MDGs process (Millennium Project, 2006), that the failure of governance is one of the root causes of the failure of development, which in turn is reflected in the presence of the entire goal dedicated to governance – SDG16 (Larsson, 2015). The latter relies on the mapping, seen in Figure 2, between the WSIS action lines – “eighteen areas of activity in which governments, civil society entities, businesses and international organizations could work together to achieve the potential of ICTs for development” (UNESCO, 2016, p. 1) and SDGs which establishes how ICTs can support different SDGs and their targets (WSIS, 2014). To answer the Aspiration Question, we apply the cause-effect framework of the Digital Government Evolution model, treating the implementation of SDGs and individual goals and targets as pressures on Member States, and examining the levels of Digital Government innovations required to advance different SDG targets. The levels are determined by referring to one of the four evolution stages – Digitization, Transformation, Engagement or Contextualization. The detailed examination considers the original formulation of the targets in (UNGA, 2015) and the logical characterization of the stages (Janowski, 2015) to justify classification. Percentages of the targets and goals are then calculated for different stages. To answer the Capacity Question, we apply the results of the latest edition of the United Nations e-Government Survey (UNDESA, 2016b) and particularly the Online Service Index and the e-Participation Index of this survey as proxy values to establish whether a Member State reached the Transformation or Engagement stages respectively. For the remaining two stages, we assume that all Member States have reached the Digitization stage by default, and a subset of those that reached the Engagement stage also reached the Contextualization stage. The roles of the Online Service Index and the e-Participation Index in establishing the Transformation and Engagement stages respectively is described in the following paragraphs. The Online Service Index (OSI) determines the maturity of electronic public service provision according to the Emerging, Enhanced, Transactional and Connected stages. The Emerging and Enhanced services indicate capacity to engage in one-way or basic two-way communication between government and citizens, including provision of information on government websites, downloading of forms and submission of requests (Bertot, Estevez & Janowski 2016). They require Digital Government capacity essentially at the Digitization stage. The Transactional and Connected services indicate capacity to engage in full two-way communication between government and citizens, including submitting and processing forms, as well as internal coordination between agencies, including cross-agency integrative services using multiple technologies and platforms (Bertot, Estevez & Janowski 2016). They increasingly require Digital Government capacity at the Transformation stage. Given that the value of OSI is always between 0 and 1 inclusive, we consider that a Member State reached the Transformation stage if and only if its OSI value is greater than 0.5. The e-Participation Index (EPI) determines the maturity of eparticipation mechanisms present on the Member States' government portals, classified into three levels: 1) e-Information: “Enabling participation by providing citizens with public information and access to information without or upon demand” (UNDESA, 2016b, p. 141), 2) eConsultation: “Engaging citizens in contributions to and deliberation on public policies and services” (UNDESA, 2016b, p. 141) and 3) eDecision-making: “Empowering citizens through co-design of policy options and co-production of service components and delivery modalities” (UNDESA, 2016b, p. 141). While the provision of e-Information might be fulfilled with Digital Government at the Digitization or Transformation stages, the presence of e-Consultation and particularly eDecision-making mechanisms increasingly indicate capacity to receive and process citizen contributions, and to engage in co-design and coproduction of services and policies. This essentially requires Digital Government capacity at the Engagement stage. The exact value of the EPI
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Table 3 Technology-related targets across the SDGs agenda. NO TARGETS REFERENCES TO DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY
EXPLICIT? ROLE
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18
1.4 2.a 4.b 5.b 6.a 7.a 7.b 8.2 9.4 9.5 9.a 9.b 9.c 12.a 14.a 17.6 17.7 17.8
No No Yes Yes No No No No No No No No Yes No No No No Yes
Support Support Enabler Enabler Support Support Support Support Support Support Support Support Goal Support Support Support Support Enabler
19
17.16
No
Support
access to new technology for the poor and the vulnerable technological development to enhance agricultural productivity scholarships for enrolling in information and communication technology programmes enhancing the use of information and communication technology to promote woman empowerment recycling and reuse technologies clean energy research and technology upgrading technology to supply modern and sustainable energy services technological upgrading and innovation to achieve higher levels of economic productivity clear and environmentally sounds technologies for sustainable industry development upgrading technological capabilities for industrial sectors while encouraging innovation technological support for sustainable and resilient infrastructure domestic technology development increasing access to information and communication technology and providing universal and affordable access to the Internet strengthening technological capacity of developing countries toward more sustainable patters of consumption and production transfer of marine technology to improve ocean health, cooperation on technology and innovation and the global technology facilitation mechanism development, transfer, dissemination and diffusion of environmentally sound technologies to developing countries technology bank and science, technology and innovation capacity building, and enhancing the use of enabling technology, particularly information and communication technology sharing of technology through the global partnership
threshold to determine when a Member State reached the Engagement stage should be set at the lowest value such that all Member States above the EPI threshold are also above the OSI threshold. This is to guarantee that all Member States that reached the Engagement stage also reached the Transformation stage. 5. Findings This section presents the research findings concerning the main research question and three sub-questions formulated in Section 1: the Relevance Question is addressed in Section 5.1, the Aspiration Question is addressed in Section 5.2, the Capacity Question is addressed in Section 5.3, and the main research question is addressed in Section 5.4. 5.1. Relevance: Digital Government and SDGs In order to address the Relevance Question “Is Digital Government capacity relevant for the Member States' efforts aimed at implementing SDGs?”, we examine two main constituents of Digital Government – public governance and digital technology. There is mounting evidence about the relevance of public governance to development in general and to the MDGs in particular. Following a systematic review of the MDGs literature, multiple authors refer to MDGs as unrealistic due to ignoring the absence of local capacity, particularly governance capacity (Fehling, Nelson, & Venkatapuram, 2013). After correlating six World Bank's governance indicators – voice and accountability, political stability, government effectiveness, regulatory
quality, the rule of law and control of corruption (Kaufmann, Kraay, & Mastruzzi, 2011) – with progress on MDGs made in 141 countries, two of the indicators – government effectiveness and the rule of law were confirmed to have statistically significant effect on such progress (Miyazawa & Zusman, 2015). According to the Millennium Project (2006), four reasons for the shortfall in the achievement of the MDGs are: poverty traps – many well-governed countries are too poor to help themselves; pockets of poverty – economic development and political disempowerment leaves many territories and groups behind; policy neglect in the areas such as environment, gender equality or maternal health; and public governance. Typical instances of governance failure leading to development failure include: not upholding the rule of law, pursuing unsound economic policies, making wrong public investments, mismanaging public administration systems, not protecting basic human rights, and not supporting civil society organizations in national decision-making. We recall all this evidence to support the proposition that public governance is relevant to SDGs. Unlike governance, digital technology does not have a dedicated goal within the SDGs framework, but 19 relevant targets spread across the entire SDGs portfolio. As analyzed in Table 3, four among such targets directly relate to digital technology and the remaining 15 require digital technology as a tool to support other technological developments. In addition, the most relevant effort to link digital technology and SDGs is the mapping between the WSIS action lines and SDGs carried out by the WSIS project (WSIS, 2014). The exercise produced a matrix, depicted in Fig. 2, where the intersection of rows (SDGs) and columns (WSIS Action Line) determines the presence of evidence
Table 4 Digital Government Evolution model adapted after (Janowski, 2015). VARIABLES NO
STAGES
Internal government transformation
Transformation affects external relationships
Transformation is context-sensitive
1
Digitization (Technology in Government) Transformation (Electronic Government) Engagement (Electronic Governance) Contextualization (Policy-Driven Electronic Governance)
no
no
no
yes
no
no
yes
yes
no
yes
yes
yes
Governance
Development
2 3 4
IMPACT Government
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Fig. 1. Digital Government Evolution cause-effect framework adapted after (Janowski, 2015).
drawn from the WSIS Stocktaking database (ITU, 2016) that the initiatives carried out under different WSIS Action Lines contribute to different SDGs. One example of this linkage is the Open Data Policy by the Office of the President of Mexico which “mandates all federal agencies to follow an ‘open by default’ standard for all their public data” with the aim to “create an ecosystem of co-creation of public services; trigger innovation, entrepreneurship and economic growth, drive transparency and reduce corruption” (Office of the President of Mexico, 2014, p. 1). The initiative is carried out under the Action Line C1 “The role of governments and all stakeholders in the promotion of ICTs for development” (WSIS, 2014, p. 19) and particularly the development of national estrategies, and contributes to the target 16.6 “Develop effective, accountable and transparent institutions at all levels” (UNGA, 2015, p. 25) under SDG16. The initiative is one of the evidences to support the linkage between C1 and SDG16. We recall such evidences to support the proposition that digital technology is relevant to SDGs. The above justifies separately the relevance of public governance and digital technology – two core components of Digital Government – to SDGs. On this basis, we claim indirectly that Digital Government is relevant to SDGs as well, which answers the Relevance Question. 5.2. Aspiration: Digital Government Capacity for Implementing SDGs To address the Aspiration Question “What is the adequate level of the Member States' Digital Government capacity to support their efforts aimed at implementing SDGs?” from Section 1, we apply the causeeffect framework from the Digital Government Evolution model. In the framework, SDGs are regarded as a pressure on governments, i.e. the pressure to fulfill international commitment for implementing SDGs, and Digital Government innovation constitutes a response to this pressure, i.e. how Digital Government can support the implementation of SDGs and therefore the fulfillment of this commitment. See Fig. 3. More specifically, to answer the Aspiration Question, we intended to determine what level of Digital Government capacity, according to the Digital Government Evolution model, is required for implementing SDGs. To this end, we examined all 169 targets, looking at the original formulation of the targets in (UNGA, 2015) and the logical characterization of the four stages in (Janowski, 2015). The result is that most SDG targets require Digital Government capacity at the Contextualization stage, i.e. Digital Government that is not only digitized, transformed and engaged, but able to improve development conditions for citizens, businesses and other non-state entities. Consider, e.g. the target 2.3 “By 2030, double the agricultural productivity and incomes of small-scale food producers, in particular women, indigenous peoples, family farmers … including through secure and equal access to … markets and opportunities” (UNGA, 2015, p. 15). The “development condition” referred to in this target is increasing agricultural productivity and incomes of small-scale farmers. An example of how contextualization-stage Digital Government can contribute to establishing this condition is e-Soko – a system that delivers market price information through text messages to rural farmers in Rwanda, based on the field staff from the Ministry of Agriculture and Animal
Resources collecting daily market prices and updating the e-Soko database through mobile phones (Estevez et al., 2013). Another example is target 11.6 “By 2030, reduce the adverse per capita environmental impact of cities, including by paying special attention to air quality and municipal and other waste management” (UNGA, 2015, p. 25). The “development condition” referred to in this target is reducing city-generated environmental impact. An example of how Digital Government at the Contextualization stage could contribute to establishing this condition is Green Heart – the local government initiative launched by the City Council of Brisbane, Australia, which provides incentives, services and rebates to citizens, businesses and institutions to live and work in more sustainable ways, delivered through information services, simulations, visualizations, online participation and other technology-enhanced measures (Estevez et al., 2013). While most SDG targets require the highest Contextualization stage of Digital Government, similar to the targets 2.3 and 11.6 described above, we also observe 22 possible exceptions for which Transformation or Engagement-stage Digital Government may be required, most of them under SDG16 and SDG17. The exceptions are listed and categorized in Table 5. Figs. 4 and 5 depict Digital Government stage requirements for different SDGs and SDG targets, and percentages of targets for different Digital Government stages respectively. Ten SDGs require Contextualization-stage Digital Government for all their targets, whereas seven permit lower stages for some targets. The largest contributors are SDG16 with seven targets and SDG17 with six targets. Most
Fig. 2. Linking WSIS Action Lines with SDGs (WSIS, 2014).
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exceptions concern the Transformation stage – 14 targets (8%), followed by the Engagement stage – 8 targets (5%), but none for Digitization. The remaining 147 Contextualization-stage targets constitute 87% of all SDG targets. In conclusion, we can now answer the Aspiration Question, that the adequate level of the Member States' Digital Government capacity for implementing SDGs is Contextualization. More specifically, Contextualization-stage Digital Government is required for 87% of the SDG targets, while 8% and 5% of the targets require Transformationand Engagement-stage Digital Government respectively. However, none of the SDG targets can be fulfilled with Digital Government at the Digitization stage. 5.3. Capacity: Digital Government Capacity by Member States To address the Capacity Question “What are the current levels of the Member States' Digital Government capacity to support their efforts aimed at implementing SDGs?” from Section 1, we apply the latest edition of the UN e-Government Survey (UNDESA, 2016b) and particularly the Online Service Index and the e-Participation Index components of the survey. As explained in Section 4, the Online Service Index (OSI) determines the presence of online services on the national government portals according to the Emerging, Enhanced, Transactional and Connected stages. The Emerging and Enhanced services represent the presence of Digital Government before the Transformation stage, while Transactional and Connected services represent the presence of Digital Government at the Transformation stage. For that reason, we chose the “halfway” threshold of 0.5 for the Member State's OSI value to indicate the presence of the Transformation-stage Digital Government. Considering the results of the 2016 survey (UNDESA, 2016b), out of the 193 Member States, 12 have their OSI value between 0.9 and 1.0, 13 between 0.8 and 0.9, 21 between 0.7 and 0.8, 22 between 0.6 and 0.7 and 19 between 0.5 and 0.6. Altogether, 87 or 45% of all Member States have the value of OSI greater than 0.5 – we consider that such Member States reached the Transformation stage of Digital Government, while 106 or 55% of all Member States have the value of OSI less than or equal to 0.5 – such Member States did not reach the Transformation stage of Digital Government. These results are depicted in Fig. 6. As explained in Section 4, the e-Participation Index (EPI) determines the presence of e-participation features on the national government portals according to the e-Information, e-Consultation and e-Decisionmaking stages. The e-Information features indicates the presence of Digital Government before the Engagement stage, while eConsultation and particularly e-Decision-making features indicate the presence of Digital Government at the Engagement stage. However, the presence of the e-participation features on the national government
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portals does not automatically mean that such features are used to support actual participation of citizens in government affairs. For that reason, the threshold for the EPI value to enter the Engagement stage should be set higher than the 0.5 threshold for the OSI value to enter the Transformation stage. What exact value should be used? In order to be consistent with the Digital Government Evolution model, all Member States that reached the Engagement stage should have reached the Transformation stage as well. The setting of the EPI threshold should ensure this property. Consider Table 6 with data from the 2016 survey (UNDESA, 2016a), sorted on the value of EPI and including all Member States with OSI value above the threshold and the next Member States with OSI value immediately below this threshold. The first Member State with OSI value below the threshold is Romania with OSI = 0.45652. Romania's EPI = 0.62712 is shared by Argentina, Guatemala, Liechtenstein and Turkey, just below EPI = 0.64407 shared by Belgium, Qatar, Kuwait, Costa Rica and Albania. The former five countries should not meet the EPI threshold as their OSI values are below the OSI threshold. The latter five countries should meet the EPI threshold as their OSI values are above the OSI threshold. Thus, to ensure that all Member States that reached the Engagement stage also reached the Transformation stage, we set the EPI threshold at 0.63. Considering the results of the 2016 survey (UNDESA, 2016b), out of 193 Member States assessed, 11 have their EPI value between 0.9 and 1.0, 13 between 0.8 and 0.9, 18 between 0.7 and 0.8, and 17 between 0.63 and 0.7. Altogether, 59 or 31% of all assessed Member States have the value of EPI greater than 0.63 – we consider that such Member States reached the Engagement stage of Digital Government, while 134 or 69% of all Member States have the value of EPI less than or equal to 0.63 – we consider that such Member States did not reach the Engagement stage of Digital Government. These results are depicted in Fig. 7. In conclusion, we can now answer the Capacity Question. The current levels of the Member States' Digital Government capacity comprise: 100% of the Member States at the Digitization stage, 45% of the Member States at the Transformation stage, 31% of the Member States at the Engagement stage and less than 31% of the Member States at the Contextualization stage. 5.4. Gap: Aspiration-Capacity Gap We can finally respond to the main research question “Is the Member States' Digital Government capacity sufficient to support their efforts aimed at implementing SDGs?”. First, using the Relevance Question, we can confirm that building Digital Government capacity is relevant to the implementation of SDGs. Second, according to the Aspiration Question, those Member
Fig. 3. Digital Government Evolution cause-effect framework and SDGs implementation as pressure on governments, adapted after (Janowski, 2015).
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Table 5 Candidate SDG targets requiring lower stages of Digital Government. STAGES NO TARGETS DESCRIPTIONS (UNGA, 2015) 5.4
2
5.5
3
5.b
4
11.3
5
11.a
6
12.7
7 8
13.2 13.3
9
15.9
10
16.3
11 12 13 14
16.6 16.7 16.9 16.10
15
16.a
16 17
16.b 17.8
18
17.9
19 20
17.14 17.17
21
17.18
22
17.19
Digitization Transformation Engagement Contextualization
Recognize and value unpaid care and domestic work through the provision of public services, infrastructure and social protection policies and the promotion of shared responsibility within the household and the family as nationally appropriate Ensure women's full and effective participation and equal opportunities for leadership at all levels of decision-making in political, economic and public life Enhance the use of enabling technology, in particular information and communications technology, to promote the empowerment of women By 2030, enhance inclusive and sustainable urbanization and capacity for participatory, integrated and sustainable human settlement planning and management in all countries Support positive economic, social and environmental links between urban, peri-urban and rural areas by strengthening national and regional development planning Promote public procurement practices that are sustainable, in accordance with national policies and priorities Integrate climate change measures into national policies, strategies and planning Improve education, awareness-raising and human and institutional capacity on climate change mitigation, adaptation, impact reduction and early warning By 2020, integrate ecosystem and biodiversity values into national and local planning, development processes, poverty reduction strategies and accounts Promote the rule of law at the national and international levels and ensure equal access to justice for all Develop effective, accountable and transparent institutions at all levels Ensure responsive, inclusive, participatory and representative decision-making at all levels By 2030, provide legal identity for all, including birth registration Ensure public access to information and protect fundamental freedoms, in accordance with national legislation and international agreements Strengthen relevant national institutions, including through international cooperation, for building capacity at all levels, in particular in developing countries, to prevent violence and combat terrorism and crime Promote and enforce non-discriminatory laws and policies for sustainable development Fully operationalize the technology bank and science, technology and innovation capacity-building mechanism for least developed countries by 2017 and enhance the use of enabling technology, in particular information and communications technology Enhance international support for implementing effective and targeted capacity-building in developing countries to support national plans to implement all the Sustainable Development Goals, including through North-South, South-South and triangular cooperation Enhance policy coherence for sustainable development Encourage and promote effective public, public-private and civil society partnerships, building on the experience and resourcing strategies of partnerships By 2020, enhance capacity-building support to developing countries, including for least developed countries and small island developing States, to increase significantly the availability of high-quality, timely and reliable data disaggregated by income, gender, age, race, ethnicity, migratory status, disability, geographic location and other characteristics relevant in national contexts By 2030, build on existing initiatives to develop measurements of progress on sustainable development that complement gross domestic product, and support statistical capacity-building in developing countries
X
X X X X X X X X X X X X X X
X X
X
X X X
X
20 18 16 14 12 Targets
1
Stage 1 - Digizaon
10
Stage 2 - Transformaon
8
Stage 3 - Engagement
6
Stage 4 - Contextualizaon
4 2 0
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17
Goals Fig. 4. Digital Government stage requirements for SDG targets.
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5% Stage 4 - Contextualizaon 87%
Stage 3 - Engagement
13%
Stage 2 - Transformaon 8%
Stage 1 - Digizaon
0%
Fig. 5. Percentages of SDG targets for different Digital Government stage requirements.
States that built Digital Government capacity at the Contextualization stage can be considered ready for the implementation of SDGs, while those that built such capacity at the earlier Digitization, Transformation or Engagement stages are not ready. Third and finally, according to the Aspiration and Capacity Questions, less than 31% of the Member States are ready for implementing SDGs. Thus, for 69% of the Member States there is a gap between Aspiration and Capacity concerning Digital Government readiness for implementing SDGs. However, the gap is unequal for different Member States: the largest gap exists for 55% of the Member States that did not advance beyond the Digitization stage, smaller gap exists for 14% of the Member States that reached the Transformation but not the Engagement stage, and the smallest gap exists for less than 31% of the Member States that reached the Engagement but not the Contextualization stage. Furthermore, if the implementation concerns not the entire SDGs portfolio but individual targets, then the Contextualization-stage Digital Government is a requirement for 87% of the SDG targets, the Engagement-stage Digital Government is a requirement for 5% of the targets, and the Transformation-stage Digital Government is a requirement for 8% of the targets. 6. Conclusions The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (UNGA, 2015) is a global framework to guide the Member States' development efforts in the next 15 years, continuing the mission and vision of the Millennium Development Goals (UNGA, 2000). This article develops the argument that Digital Government should play a key role in the implementation
0
5
Member States 10 15 20
of the Agenda, and that the Member State governments should embrace this role by developing strong Digital Government capabilities. Using a series of stages put forward by the Digital Government Evolution model – Digitization, Transformation, Engagement and Contextualization (Janowski, 2015) – the article analyzed 17 goals and 169 targets under the Agenda, and found out that the vast majority of targets requires the presence of the Digital Government capacity at the mature Contextualization stage. The only notable exception is the Sustainable Development Goal 16 – the “governance” goal – where the majority of targets require Transformation and Engagement stages only. The article also found out that less than 31% of the Member States have the required Digital Government capacity at the Contextualization stage, and 55% did not advance beyond the Digitization stage. In conclusion, for most Member States, their Digital Government capacity is insufficient to support their efforts aimed at implementing Sustainable Development Goals, and more than half experience a wide aspirationcapacity gap. The research underpinning this study has some limitations. First, the argument about the relevance of Digital Government to Sustainable Development Goals was established indirectly through the governance and technology components. The linkage should be validated directly, e.g. by recalling the evidence from (Estevez et al., 2013) and (WSIS, 2014). Second, the analysis of the SDG targets compares terse, unstructured formulations of the targets (UNGA, 2015) against relatively precise and structured descriptions of the Digital Government Evolution stages and their logical characterization (Janowski, 2015). Due to this, the comparison is to some extent subjective. Third, establishing the presence of the Digital
25
0.9 - 1.0 0.8 - 0.9
45% 55%
0.7 - 0.8
OSI
0.6 - 0.7 0.5 - 0.6 0.4 - 0.5 0.3 - 0.4 0.2 - 0.3 0.1 - 0.2 0.0 - 0.1
Member States in Transformaon stage (OSI > 0.5) Member States before Transformaon stage (OSI <= 0.5)
Fig. 6. Value of Online Service Index indicating Transformation-stage Digital Government.
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Table 6 Data from the 2016 UN e-Government Survey above the OSI and EPI thresholds for Transformation and Engagement stages.
instruments. Fifth, this work was driven by the single-researcher's search for answers to the questions of relevance, aspiration and capacity concerning Digital Government and Sustainable Development Goals. As such, the search might have introduced some bias. The significance of the findings is that they identify a wide capacity gap in a critical area for the implementation of the 2030 Sustainable Development agenda, the area that already suffers, as some argue, from policy neglect. In addition, as many governance functions are increasingly realized through or enhanced by digital technology, this lack of Digital Government capacity by so many Member States may in turn undermine the enabling role of public governance for implementing the 2030 Agenda in the increasingly digital world. Acknowledgements The author would like to thank Elsa Estevez and Marijn Janssen for useful feedback and comments on earlier versions of this article. References
Government capacity at the Transformation and Engagement stages applies respectively the Online Service Index and the e-Participation Index of the UN e-Government Survey (UNDESA, 2016b), both as proxy values. The reliability of this representation should be validated. Fourth, for Member States that reached the Engagement stage, there is no measure to determine whether they also reached the Contextualization stage based upon existing benchmarking
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