Abstract
Nowadays, digital infrastructures play a primary role in the governance of public administrations as they are considered a suitable way for delivering public services in a more effective, efficient and “smart” way. The growing employment of digital tools has prompted the academic debate to coin the concept of “digital-era governance”, to summarize the set of reforms driven by the centrality of digital technology and infrastructures in the public sector. Digital technologies can be used to deliver public services, and they can also be used to shorten the distance between public administrations and citizens through the facilitation of the engagement of stakeholders. The potential role of digital technologies to support multi-stakeholder engagement and thus improve public service performance has been only recently, but still limitedly, empirically investigated. Therefore, the current project is designed to investigate what are the main critical issues and drivers to focus on to make the digital transformation of public services successful in supporting the delivery of effective services, especially considering stakeholders’ engagement. The project will focus on the digital public services delivered by public administrations to support citizens-entrepreneurs and companies through the “One Stop Shop for Productive Activities” (“Sportello Unico per le Attività Produttive”, SUAP) digital office, the point of contact between public institutions and businesses for obtaining the authorisations needed to start and manage productive activities. The empirical analysis will be carried out in two regional contexts, Tuscany and Emilia-Romagna, which represent two regional governments committed to enhance the digital transformation of the public administrations and to facilitate public participation. To achieve its purpose, the research will rely on a variety of research methods to collect empirical data, such as review of the literature, online surveys, semi-structured interviews, and co-creation laboratories, and on a set of tools to analyse the data, such as Qualtrics and NVivo. Through the implementation of an interventionist research approach, the project is designed to engage the different stakeholders involved in the SUAP multi-stakeholder governance model and co-develop with them potential ideas and proposals for the improvement of the digital infrastructures, making them more responsive to the stakeholders’ needs and then increasing their resilience. The results of this project should lead to the identification of the strengths and weaknesses of the digital infrastructures and the development of ideas for their improvement as drivers for better service delivery and for facilitating stakeholder engagement.