Impact of digital transformation on public governance

Public governance concerns how the roles and relations of all actors are organised, structured, managed and administered, including power and competence relationships and the levers that each actor has, particularly when using digital technology. Its overall purpose is to deliver public value benefits that promote the prosperity, wellbeing and flourishing of all people and all parts of society, as enabled by nature’s life-support systems. The focus is on the EU but also with a broader international perspective. The setting is (liberal) democratic systems, with their country, regional and local variations and the EU as the overarching level of governance. The EU already has many policies to promote the public values of good governance as the means of tackling its challenges to achieve these public value benefits. However, at the end of 2022, there is a renewed need for two reappraisals. First, a thorough mapping and understanding of the public governance arrangements, defined as paradigms in this report that have and are being deployed across all the EU’s multi-governance levels, the role played by digital technology and the impacts these have had. Second, an analysis of the new strategic challenges the EU faces, especially since early 2020 with the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine and the dramatically escalating social, economic and environmental crises, taking account of the role that digital technology and data can play.