Digital Governance as a Scientific Concept

Abstract

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”. Although 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.