This paper aims to demystify the concept of data-driven public administration and lay bare the complexity involved in its implementation. It asks the overall research question of what challenges are encountered and problematised in a nascent phase of data-driven public administration implementation. The analysis is based on a multi-method research design, including a survey, follow-up interviews with practitioners and an analysis of key policy documents in the context of the Norwegian public sector. It highlights areas of both discrepancy and harmony between what has been prioritised at the policy level and the reality of implementation on the ground. In addition, unseen issues are discussed in order to broaden this perspective. Data-driven administrative reform touches upon everything from organisational culture to technical infrastructure and legal and regulatory frameworks. The complexity laid out in the analysis thus has implications for theory and practice. Nordic countries provide an interesting object of investigation, as they hold vast amounts of data and are highly digitalised, yet, in common with many other governments, they are still in a nascent phase of implementation. This paper should therefore be relevant to other jurisdictions and it provides a call to arms for civil servants and public administration scholars to engage more deeply in this phenomenon.
The administrative reform of the datafied public administration places great emphasis on the classification, control, and prediction of citizen behavior and therefore has the potential to significantly impact citizen–state relations. There is a growing body of literature on data-oriented activism which aims to resist and counteract existing harmful data practices. However, little is known about the processes, policies, and political-economic structures that make datafication possible. There is a distinct research gap on situated and context-specific empirical research, which critically interrogates the premises, interests, and agendas of data-driven public administration and how stakeholders can impact them. This paper therefore studies the conditions of participation in public administration datafication. It asks the overall research question of how citizens are problematized and included in policy and practitioner discourse in the datafication of public administration. The paper takes Norway as its case and applies Cardullo and Kitchin’s scaffold of smart citizen participation at the system level. It makes use of a unique empirical insight into the field, consisting of a survey, interviews, and an extensive document analysis. Unexpectedly, we find that citizens and civil society are rarely engaged in this administrative reform. Instead, we identify a paternalistic, top-down, technocratic approach where the context, values, and agendas of datafication are obscured from the citizen.
This panel presents on-going research from a large research project on digital infrastructures and citizen participation in the Nordic countries, with a focus on the datafication of the public sector and the construction of new borders between public services and citizens. In recent years, governments have faced increasing pressures to become datafied or “data-driven”. A more data-driven public is said to be able to develop a whole new range of services that are envisaged to result in better services, more effective government, more transparency in the public sector, more just service delivery, and the empowerment of citizens. The panel critically examines the challenges that arise when the precepts are to be converted into working services – such as: What kinds of foreseen and unforeseen transformations does the development of new services give rise to? • What kinds of resistance are the new services facing? • What new forms of expertise, enrollment of new actors, organizational restructuring and redelegation of roles and relations are needed? • How are citizens/clients envisioned and inscribed into the scenarios for future public administration? • How are citizens/clients consulted in the design and development of the services? • How are the new services experienced by citizens/clients? In sum, the presentations in this panel span a range of urgent themes related to the construction of borders (and alleys) between public sector services and citizens – from anticipations to effects and efforts.
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