Global digital governance has been rising in response to a dual process of globalization and digitalization. Serving the innovation and application of digital technologies, global digital governance requires global cooperation to achieve economic benefits and cope with digital transformation challenges, covering issues, such as the Internet, digital tax, and trans-border data flow. The extant literature fails to answer why these challenges have been getting intense in recent decades and why the global governance responses to them may vary in different ways. This study argues that the transformation from protective immunity of digital platforms to Techlash against big tech triggered the rapid development of global digital governance. Following the paradigm shift argument, the paper further proposes an integrated framework to analyze the characteristics of the new model to explain the heterogeneity across global digital governance issues. The major constituent elements of this framework include the nature of the global commons (comedy or tragedy), global power structure (decentralized or centralized), and the governance regime (technocracy or democracy). This study applies the framework to analyze three cases of global digital governance issues and demonstrates its analytical power.

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Despite the ample literature on government transparency, our knowledge about how the vertical power structure of governments shapes local compliance with government transparency mandates is still limited. This study sets out to address this gap. Specifically, we investigate how the central government's environmental information disclosure (EID) signal and provincial governments’ conflicting signal of economic growth affect, independently and interactively, city governments’ compliance with central EID mandates in the center-province-city hierarchical structure in China. We argue that the central EID signal positively affects city compliance, while the provincial signal of economic growth reduces it. Moreover, the provincial signal of economic growth negatively moderates the impact of the central EID signal. Empirically, with a panel dataset for city-level governments from 2008 to 2018, we found robust evidence strongly supporting our theoretical hypotheses. Points for practitioners This research reveals the influences of the complex dynamics among governments at different levels on local compliance with government transparency mandates. The findings suggest that the maneuvers of middle-level governments in a multilevel power structure and the interactions among multiple conflicting policy goals should be taken seriously by practitioners when designing policies to promote government transparency reforms.