Digital government as “glue” in multi-level government contexts

Digital government are transforming governmental structures and institutions. The common institutional arrangement of a multi-level government system (MLG) clearly affected by the increased use of digital government systems within public administration. This is a hierarchical structure structuring powers and resources in which digital government has to be embedded. The outcomes of digitalization in such settings can be different. This argument builds on two previous implementation studies that open for this argument. These studies are here used as illustrations for the theoretical embedding of how digitalization can glue levels of government together. The conclusion is that digital government systems, if used smartly, can function as glue between the levels of government in an MLG system

Trust in safe public e-services: Translating policies into use.

The emerging information society changes the relations between public agencies and citizens in many ways. One of the most used is the use of public e-services for interactions between public agencies and citizens. Public e-services as such are innovations, even if the service as such has been there before, it is a new way producing and organizing the service. For successful implementation of innovations the innovations has to be considered as legitimate by all involved actors. They have to trust the organization and not at least its safety aspects. Safety in web-innovations is created through both the practical real technical arrangement and practical experiences of the use of the innovation. On a European and national level there are some policies and some standardization of public e-services. But since the Swedish public administrations rely on a double steering approach with strong constitutional regional and local autonomy such policies cannot be forced out into regional local public agencies. Instead such European and national statements become soft policy instruments in the local context and the implications from them rely on the local context and not at least the competences of the professionals in the administration. Since this is a new field of innovative practice it will build on an inductive methodological approach. The empirical work is primarily conducted through qualitative methods. The material will be of two types. Firstly, we will analyze general policy documents and specific policies from a selection of regional and municipal agencies. Secondly, we will analyze the constructions of meanings promoting safety on the web pages and in other information material promoting citizens to use e-services. What benefits are highlighted and how are risks and safety presented and motivated? Thereby we will be able to contribute to the communication and mediation of safety and promotion of innovation and efficiency in public administration. This analysis will both contribute to the discussion of safety in public e-services and the importance of organizational arrangements. It may also end in an innovative discussion of the interplay of standardization and local autonomy

Ydre 2.0: An alternative time-spatial approach towards post-monetarism

The post-industrial information society leads to new patterns of societal change. Despite the changes, the conventional monetary market oriented economic view of development is still dominant. However, essential values are often concealed or even excluded in conventional monetary analyses. Rural areas have a possibility to be in the forefront of new alternative routes to achieve sustainable integrated ecological, social and economic development processes that reaches beyond the conventional monetary market. The ambition of this article is thus to reach beyond the conventional urbanized economic norms and monetary values. This article aims to launch the concept of post-monetarism by elaborating and discuss a conceptual model that can contribute to alternative development approaches. The article enhance new alternative political-economic analytical tools and strategies to achieve a sustainable sound integrated socio-, economic-, and ecological development process. Using a time-spatial perspective, building on Hägerstrand's time-geography, the exploration of an alternative post-monetary norm takes off from an in-depth case study in Ydre municipality, Sweden. The empirical work is conducted through a combination of quantitative data collection, and qualitative methods primarily consisting of in-depth field studies/interviews with households. The analysis reveals the interplay between actors and structures in the interaction between people's daily life, and aggregated data of population, economic activities and political structures. Thereby we aim to reach beyond conventional economic rationale and thereby reduce (or even remove) the mismatch between (economic) micro- and macro analyses. The political implications of these potential conceptual tools could be to analyze and value people's everyday norms and activity patterns in different ways, and thereby avoid inadequate stereotyped standard policies towards development

Insider Trading and Contracting: A Critical Response to the “Chicago School”

Vallastaden växer fram som en ny stadsdel i anslutning till campus Valla vid Linköpings universitet. Stadsdelens första delar skall stå färdigt sommaren 2016 och öppnas då som en Bomässa. I denna bok diskuterar vi hur policy och planering bidrar till att forma hur livet i Vallastaden kan komma att levas. Ett särskilt fokus kommer att läggas på hur energisystemen planeras i relation till ett hållbart vardagsliv. Medborgardialog framhävs som betydelsefull för Vallastadens framväxt och vi diskuterar därför även hur Linköpings kommun har involverat medborgarna i planeringen, samt vilka risker ett stort deltagande kan medföra. Även studenternas önskemål på Vallastadens utformning tas upp. Denna rapport har tillkommit i början av planeringen av Vallastaden. Kommunen, som planerar och driver utvecklingen av Vallastaden, har bjudit in oss på universitet för att bidra till denna process på flera sätt. Planering och lokala policyer – främst om hållbarhet – är avgörande förhur stadsdelen kan utvecklas. Syftet med den här rapporten är därför att ge en kort överblick av den pågående planeringen och Vallastadens framväxt, för att kunna diskutera och reflektera kring hur den formar hållbarare liv. Vi vill belysa och fånga upp ett par, för oss, centrala teman som vi sett i utvecklingen av Vallastaden och i vår forskning om policy ochplanering för hållbarhet. Vi hoppas även att vi kan ge idéer och perspektiv till andra stadsplaneringsprojekt, både större och mindre, på andra orter med och utan universitet. Det som vi hittills lärt oss om planeringen och framväxten av Vallastaden borde kunna inspirera inte bara oss

New ways and actors when diplomacy goes digital - The e-Diplomacy Campaign Midwives4All

This article focuses on Midwives4All, an e-diplomacy campaign launched by the Swedish MFA in 2015. The campaign aims to spread knowledge about the benefits of midwives and evidence-based midwifery. Within the campaign, the Swedish MFA, and in particular its Communications Department (UD-KOM), combines e-diplomacy and networking and the campaign has become one key activity within the Swedish feminist foreign policy. It is organizing diplomacy in new ways that regards both choices of channels and the networking with inter- and nongovernmental organizations. The limited impacts of the campaign are seen as consequences of the peripheral status of the issue and the lack of systematic structures for e-diplomacy so far. In spite of this the case indicates that e-diplomacy has the potential to raise and empower both new actor groups and new issues on the diplomatic agenda.

Towards Zoomocracy – an Explorative Study on Virtual Democratic Decision Making in Swedish City Council Meetings in the Wake of the Covid-19 Pandemic

Governmental decision making is essential to maintain democracy. The decision making formats and processes are institutionalized and follow strict formats for participation, debate and decisions. The constraints and lock-downs due to the covid-19 pandemic led to an extensive increase in the use of digital meeting tools to maintain democratic decision making through virtual meetings. Our main approach in this paper is to inductively explore the changes that occur when democratic meetings take place on-line through a quantitative text analysis and interviews. We delimit our focus to speech duration in recorded meetings. We find that the virtual meeting format changed meeting characteristics compared to on-site meetings. There were some changes in speech duration among councilors which has to be further investigated in a larger sample. The main contribution of this paper is the method to measure actual speech duration and compare how virtual meetings may influence the organization of democratic meetings

e-Government for all – Norm-critical Perspectives and Public Values in Digitalization

There are hopes that e-government will bring many benefits, including efficiency, democratization, participation, and emancipation of citizens. However, despite some evidence that supports these claims there are also cases that digitalization can exclude citizens and build new barriers. This is a special challenge for already disadvantaged groups falling outside the norms. In this study we approach the notion of a norm-critical perspective in relation to e-government through a review of literature in combination with action research oriented workshops. From this we conclude that there is a need for more norm-critical perspectives in research on e-government, as most research today focuses on socio-economic digital-divide issues. We also show that it is difficult for involved actors to see beyond the norms and be norm-critical since the norms are embedded into the practices, which in this case, e-government has developed and used