Co-production in digital transformation of public administration and public value creation: The case of Denmark

_{Ada Scupola, Ines Mergel}

Public administrations are moving from digitizing single administrative forms to redesigning full processes and services with the goal to digitally transform their operations. Along this continuum, some public administrations are proceeding faster, while others lack behind in their implementation efforts. This can be due to a lack of a national digital strategy, disjointed efforts across levels of government, lack of funding, or misdirected public management reform efforts .

In the cases where digital transformation efforts have sped up and countries were successful in implementing digital services for their users, they are ranked high on e-government indexes. As a new standard, co-production and public service design has emerged and governments are including different types of stakeholders in the different phases of digital public service design. We therefore set out to understand how they approached the digital transformation, how they involved stakeholders during the co-production phases and what the outcomes in form of public value are.

In order to understand how a national government was able to successfully create public value using co-production in its digital transformation efforts, we selected Denmark. According to the most recent indices, the country has successfully transformed its public services from an analogue to a fully digital service delivery model. Online interactions between public authorities and citizens is high (90%) and well above the EU average (64%). As a result, according to the latest United Nations E-government Survey (2020), Denmark ranks first among the 193-member states of the United Nations concerning provision of online services and citizens' participation in government decisions and policy making.

The administrative, political and legislative structure of Denmark has been changed over the years to adapt to developments of digital transformation of public administration and to make its implementation possible. This need emerged at the end of the 1990's. Due to the small size of the Danish country, each single public administration unit was too small to solve the complex problems arising from digitalization by itself, therefore a need for change emerged.

Co-production was key in the success of such digital transformation. Our study shows that for Denmark to successfully develop and implement digital transformation of public administration, co-production was a key element in all the phases and levels of the digital transformation starting from strategy and policy formulation at governmental level to implementation at the decentralized public administration level. Through the co-production efforts, central, local, and regional governments as well as private sector actors and NGOs were involved in the formulation and implementation of digital strategies and policies in different multi-actor co-production activities and set ups. They vary from permanent to ad hoc task forces, committees and agencies. Our study also shows that, in the case of Denmark, an important coproduction instrument in the implementation of the digital transformation of public administration was co-financing. All public administration units at all levels of government are responsible for their own digitalization at least as part of continuous business maintenance and development.

In conclusion, we add to the existing literature insights from a highly prominent and advanced case of digital transformation of public administration and open the black box of how co-production of digital transformation occurred and what the outcomes in terms of public value are.

Translated by JiaXing Ding  Reviewed by ChangHua Chen