Manuel R. P. C. Bonduki
ABSTRACT
Digital transformation in governments is hard to implement. As a cross-cutting change process that affects public management, public policies and services across all government levels, all policy domains and State branches, it changes processes, outcomes, information management, agenda setting, and the speed and effectiveness of access to rights. It may enable social inclusion or perpetrate exclusion. In the context of federalist countries, where the specific autonomy arrangement of subnational entities tends to reflect and even favour heterogeneity, the challenge tends to be more significant. From the perspective of creating a coherent functioning digital government, one of the critical points is the capacity of both national and subnational governments to balance the implementation of digital solutions appropriate to their specific contexts without hindering integration. The issue of governmental coherence within federations is not new. The relevant literature has pointed to the need for coordination and the use of instruments and their underlying mechanisms as fundamental integration drivers. The research builds on the institutional literature that seeks to explain the policy effects of federalism and intergovernmental relations (IGR) to advance the comprehension of how to coordinate the actions of different levels of government when the delivery of effective policy is interdependent. Using the frameworks of intergovernmental relations from Wright [40] and of coordination from Bouckaert et al. [9], we aim to investigate the role of the central government as an orchestrator of state governments’ efforts to digitalize. The research question that drives the study is: how do instruments and mechanisms of coordination affect the digital transformation of subnational governments in Brazil? The empirical data will be drawn from in-depth comparative case studies from four Brazilian states and the Brazilian national government. We expect to understand how the design of coordination from the federal level, its mechanisms and instruments, shaped the digital transformation in Brazilian subnational governments.
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