Managing public digital missions: the role of governance frameworks, intermediaries, and impact assessment

In recent years, governments across the globe launched public moonshot-type missions to address grand societal challenges. Namely, the successful development and delivery of digital public mission-oriented policies (‘public digital missions’) would require the correct functioning of the underpinning network of interlinked ICT infrastructures (‘digital networks’), and similarly, the effective governance of the associated network of operators/organisations. Different models have been proposed on the way of governing an organisation’s network, where the achievement of the whole network outcome is based on the interconnected success of each organisation. However, current models of e-government and network governance respectively, such as Government as a Platform (GaaP), result in being incomplete and unable to capture the systemic complexity and trade-offs of outcome-driven network-based digital missions. First, the paper outlines the properties of a network-like governance of public digital missions when in the presence of perfect networks, in the absence of failures and tilted structures. The properties of this new network-like governance framework for achieving public digital missions are defined by integrating complexity theory and ICT network theory into e-government and network governance. While a GaaP design took inspiration from an IT Platform, the suggested network-like governance for a public digital mission would resemble more the structure of a complex ICT network e.g., the Internet. While GaaP stresses the role of a government to ensure the centralization of resources to provide better services, the mentioned networked-like governance for digital missions would be based on diffused and distributed control by default, incentivizing self-organisation and recurrent evolving. Alongside this, I outline examples of challenges arising from tilted network structure and from the presence of network failures that could hinder the implementation of such desirable public digital mission’s governance. Finally, in the presence of such network failures, the government (or a third party) would assume a new role as an enabler for distributed access and permissioned interconnection across parties to deliver better network outcomes. We describe the new hybrid government-involved governance framework required for digital missions as Government as a Network (GaaN). The name is justified by the fact that the government will have to contribute to the building and delivery of a governance working as a distributed system, like the Internet or Blockchain. The defined properties of the network-like governance for public digital missions as well as the novel GaaN framework intend to be a conceptual starting point for advancing knowledge by identifying priorities and formulating testable propositions.