ANALYSIS of Dunleavy's 'Digital Era Governance'
ANALYSIS of Dunleavy 's 'Digital Era Governance '
1. Introduction
The subject of this paper is 'Digital era governance (DEG) ', as described in the book of Dunleavy. According to Dunleavy, IT-technologies might well be the new paradigm arising in public administrations.
He explains that the old paradigm, New Public Management (NPM) has had its best day (moreover: Dunleavy calls it “intellectually dead”) and, although it has had its useful influences on public administrations, the problems arising from it are very clear too. I will not give a lot of attention to this, for this essay it is sufficient to give some examples of these problems: NPM caused widespread fragmentation and unnecessary complexity. Furthermore, by introducing contractual relations with the private sector, it hollowed out the staff and capabilities of administrations. IT-technologies are a potential solution to these problems NPM has caused.
Governments in developing countries soon started to realise the potential that the digital era was bringing. Internet and digitalisation affected a lot of aspects of life and changed whole industries, for example the music- and banking industry. So the result was that during the late 90 's and early 2000 's intentions of digitalisation were inserted in the agenda 's and programs of governments. However, Dunleavy points out, very often these nice words were not backed up by sufficient resources and a strong strategy. But there is gradually coming change to this. In advanced industrial countries, governments typically spend around 1 to 1,5 per cent GDP on public sector information technology (IT) systems. To put in perspective: in the UK this equals the whole budget for agriculture (Dunleavy, 2008). What has recently changed (partly due to the NPM-influence), and as you will see later in this essay it is not unimportant, is that governments rely on the global IT industry to build, develop and
1. Introduction
The subject of this paper is 'Digital era governance (DEG) ', as described in the book of Dunleavy. According to Dunleavy, IT-technologies might well be the new paradigm arising in public administrations.
He explains that the old paradigm, New Public Management (NPM) has had its best day (moreover: Dunleavy calls it “intellectually dead”) and, although it has had its useful influences on public administrations, the problems arising from it are very clear too. I will not give a lot of attention to this, for this essay it is sufficient to give some examples of these problems: NPM caused widespread fragmentation and unnecessary complexity. Furthermore, by introducing contractual relations with the private sector, it hollowed out the staff and capabilities of administrations. IT-technologies are a potential solution to these problems NPM has caused.
Governments in developing countries soon started to realise the potential that the digital era was bringing. Internet and digitalisation affected a lot of aspects of life and changed whole industries, for example the music- and banking industry. So the result was that during the late 90 's and early 2000 's intentions of digitalisation were inserted in the agenda 's and programs of governments. However, Dunleavy points out, very often these nice words were not backed up by sufficient resources and a strong strategy. But there is gradually coming change to this. In advanced industrial countries, governments typically spend around 1 to 1,5 per cent GDP on public sector information technology (IT) systems. To put in perspective: in the UK this equals the whole budget for agriculture (Dunleavy, 2008). What has recently changed (partly due to the NPM-influence), and as you will see later in this essay it is not unimportant, is that governments rely on the global IT industry to build, develop and
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