Outsourcing response-ability: Tales from ‘agile’ governance

As Western countries have deepened their levels of digitalisation of the public sector, governments have become increasingly interested in abandoning, or at least loosening, some of the more rigid bureaucratic structures governing the state apparatus and experimenting with the agile methodologies that grew out of Silicon Valley around the turn of the millennium. In this chapter, we argue that this increasingly widespread agile public digitalisation style is creating a need to pay more attention to the development and design, delivery, efficiency, and governance of digital public services, the infrastructures they rely on, and the societal impact of this so-called agile transformation.

We suggest understanding this problem through the prism of response-ability, an empirically derived concept consisting of three distinct but overlapping dimensions regarding the ability of the state to (a) respond fast and flexibly, (b) be held accountable for its decisions, and (c) be responsive to citizens and stakeholders. These three dimensions have always been central to democratic statehood but are re-actualised and gain new meaning as they become part of the processes of public digitalisation and agile transformation.

The chapter consists of four sections, each presenting a theme within agile and digital public transformation, in relation to which the concept of response-ability comes into play. The themes are governance, insourcing, legacy and maintenance, and citizen involvement. The sections draw on the authors’ knowledge and empirical studies of the public sectors in the Nordic countries and the UK, and draw on various data types, from interviews with key actors to field visits and publicly available documents, as well as, for some of us, previous industry experience.