Government as a platform: Intergovernmental participation for public services in the Russian Federation

Highlights

• Government as a Platform advocates integration across the whole of government, with implications for multilevel governance.

• Platform as intergovernmental management tool was not in the research focus, and the Russian case poses general questions

• Can platforms address regional inequalities in services and capacities and still accommodate different needs and priorities?

• The platform promotes standardization and centralization, but not all regions want to participate.

• Wide disparities across regions as well as Russia's highly centralized federalism create challenges for going to scale.

• Macro-level institutions (i.e. federalism, centralization) should be considered in use of the technology enactment framework.

Abstract

Government as a Platform (GaaP) has been advocated in multiple countries, and most research has concentrated on collaboration at the national level. In the Russian Federation, universal participation of regional and municipal authorities on the public services platform Gosuslugi.ru. is a priority intended to address regional disparities as well as greater efficiency. Russia serves as a case study to explore the extent to which it possible to use platforms for intergovernmental management - to effectively integrate all regions on a single platform, despite wide differences in capabilities and needs. We examine the case of Gosuslugi.ru through the technology enactment framework (Fountain, 2001). While the literature on platforms emphasizes loose coordination or orchestration, the technology enactment framework suggests that in systems with a high degree of centralization, such as Russia, platforms will be more centralized and top-down. We show the problems a highly centralized approach creates for implementation in the context of wide disparities, but the modularity and adaptability of platforms may also allow for more decentralization through choice and varied levels of participation. An open question is whether such flexibility will be allowed going forward. The technology enactment framework has been used primarily to analyze microlevel behavior within organizations. Considering macro-level institutions such as federalism can enhance use of the technology enactment framework across countries, and this case may have implications for intergovernmental participation on platforms in other nations.

Introduction

The concept of “government as a platform” (O'Reilly, 2010), has been pursued in various ways by national governments, including the United Kingdom (Brown, Fishenden, Thompson, & Venters, 2017), the Obama White House (US Government, 2012), Italy (Cordella & Paletti, 2019) and the Russian Federation. Platforms connect providers and users of information or services, facilitating network interactions, and have many potential applications for governance (Hagiu & Yoffie, 2009; Janssen & Estevez, 2013). In the private sector, Amazon, E-Bay, Uber and AirBnB have used their platforms to increase the flexibility, customization, and efficiency of exchanges. Discussion of platforms in the public sector has tended to emphasize the idea of Government as a Platform (Brown et al., 2017; Margetts & Naumann, 2017; Millard, 2018; O'Reilly, 2010), to integrate private sector and public services or to create seamless interactions for citizens across agencies, primarily at the national level. There is some recognition in the literature that national platforms might be intergovernmental, including participation by regional or local authorities (Cordella & Paletti, 2019; Millard, 2018) though little has been written about such efforts.

The Russian Federation has turned toward the idea of Government as a Platform (GaaP) as a solution for standardizing digital services across regional and municipal governments with very different resources, capacities, and needs. Through an examination of the Russian experience, we ask to what extent Government as a Platform can be used for intergovernmental coordination of regional programs and to narrow disparities in highly diverse contexts? Platforms offer shared resources that appear to be a technologically ideal solution for addressing these issues. But implementing such a system is inherently complex, especially in a geographically large country with metropolitan governments at the forefront of technology use as well as local authorities in isolated rural regions.

Russia has explicitly set regional requirements and goals for the implementation of GaaP, making it a good exploratory case in the use of platforms for intergovernmental coordination. The platform in Russia that most closely resembles the GaaP concept is Gosuslugi.ru, intended to include a broad array of services, delivered by multiple levels of government and the private sector. This includes “superservices” integrated around life cycle events rather than siloed by level of government or sector. The Gosuslugi strategy takes advantage of many of the characteristics of GaaP highlighted by previous authors: shared digital services and processes, shared data, coordination, monitoring, and regulation of service delivery through the platform (Cordella & Paletti, 2019; Janssen & Estevez, 2013; Millard, 2018; Mukhopadhyay, Bouwman, & Jaiswal, 2019). Currently, the services available to citizens through the platform are mostly Federal, with some business participation. Regional and municipal governments already provide the description of all their services through the portal, and some of these services can be delivered partly or completely in digital form. Ten regional authorities have participated in pilot efforts around digital public services, in anticipation of expanding participation by all regional and municipal governments.

We analyze the development of Gosuslugi using the technology enactment framework (Fountain, 2001) because its institutional approach lends itself to an examination of how Russian federalism affects platform development. Federal systems have generally been adopted in nations as a means of balancing differences in regional contexts and priorities with national needs and may face problems of inequality and uneven implementation of national laws or program objectives (De Pietro & Francetic, 2018; Kundra, 2010). While Russian federalism is highly centralized in comparison with other nations, we believe this case raises relevant issues about platforms in general as tools to manage relationships across levels of government. To date, the technology enactment framework has been used to address the impact of institutions at the micro-level rather than the effects of macro-level institutions such as federalism. Such a lens is needed for understanding how platforms might be used in different countries, and the Russian case clearly calls for consideration of federalist institutions as they have evolved even within one nation.

How might Government as a Platform influence relationships between the Federal and subnational governments in Russia? What does this suggest about intergovernmental use of platforms more generally? We begin with a review of public sector platform concepts and research, followed by a discussion of the technology enactment framework. The next section on methodology includes consideration of Russian intergovernmental platforms as a case study of technology enactment. Following the enactment framework, we then discuss the history of Russian digital government, Russian platform technologies, goals for GaaP, Russian federalism as the institutional setting for the case, networks in government, and networks as business and citizen participation. We apply the enactment framework to the case in the discussion and consider future directions for the platform before concluding remarks about broader implications for theory and practice.