There’s a persistent orthodoxy about how the world is changing and how government should change with it. We hear words like agile, connected, responsive, user-centric, open and innovative.

And we hear that the world is increasingly complex, or the rate of technological progress is too fast for governments to keep up, so government must change. Governments have been hearing this recommendation for decades and changing only at the surface—rarely at their foundations. This could be because we are misdiagnosing the problem, coming up with the wrong solutions or failing to implement solutions correctly.

In 2016–2017, the Public Policy Forum dedicated the Prime Ministers of Canada Fellowship to the idea of “governance in the digital age.” The goal was to explore and explain how the world is changing and how governments are responding.

The report you are reading is intended as a resource to practitioners and a conversation starter for those who are thinking about the pressures of change on our governance systems. It is the result of a year of research, surveys and interviews with almost 300 government practitioners and stakeholders in Canada and across the world.

This report discusses the concepts of open government, digital government, public sector innovation and how governments are trying to manage rapidly changing technological and societal trends. It looks for common patterns in behaviour and practice, and how those patterns have played out in various contexts.

This report is not about, for example, whether governments need to engage more with citizens and across sectors. Rather, the starting point is this: If more engagement were a goal, how would it succeed and how would the structures of government create challenges?

In the course of my research, I heard two competing analyses: one early and common hypothesis was that the structures and designs of government aren’t set up for digital-era governance. The other view was that, on close scrutiny, we see that our public governance is reasonably effective; for instance, Canada’s civil service has been ranked as the most effective in the world.[1] And we can find some stellar success stories for digital transformation and open government.

After a year of interviews, the hypothesis that government is not set up for digital-era governance appears to hold up. Success stories for digital governance, while they exist, are not the norm. Initiatives to transform to digital governance across jurisdictions rely on a web of workarounds, fast tracks, exemptions and executive air cover. Stories of progress in digital transformation followed by backslide are common; the departure of a single key official is in some cases enough to derail a whole program.

This leads to another common storyline: Often, responsible executives are unaware of implementation challenges and how frustrating the employee or citizen experience could be. Executives have line of sight to the programs and services that benefit from their oversight and intervention; the ones that are struggling because they can’t get attention are necessarily hidden from view. The tip of the iceberg looks very different from the rest of it.

Effective governance depends on the work of responsible officials who have an honest and accurate understanding of both progress and challenges.

The digital era is shining a light on how important that understanding is. The more data we have about the world, the more we recognize how complex it is. Governments have to solve problems with an approach that is more holistic, more contextualized to people’s needs and that reflects more voices. Meanwhile, technology is becoming increasingly specialized, mixes in unpredictable ways, and advances at scale across the globe rapidly. It’s becoming more challenging for governments to keep up with the state of the market, whether they are trying to take advantage of technology or govern it.