Shared services – “less administrative burden, lower costs, more legal certainty” – an award-winning joint procurement centre in the German district of Groß-Gerau
Description of the collaboration Against the backdrop of burgeoning public deficits and pressing infrastructure challenges typical of a rapidly growing population, in 2013, the district of Groß-Gerau in the German federal state of Hesse, adopted inter-municipal collaboration (IMC) as a key approach for sustainability and prosperity of its 14 member cities and municipalities. Since then,…
Read MoreDigitalstadt Darmstadt. A collaborative network and its structural backbone
© Digitalstadt Darmstadt website: https://digitalstadt-darmstadt.de The programme Digitalstadt Darmstadt evolved as a result of winning a 2017 Bitkom competition to create a German “digital model city with international appeal” (Bitkom e.V., 2020). Motivated by this success, the city of Darmstadt has further been supported by several private and public sponsors such as Deutsche Telekom and…
Read MoreImplementing the Online Access Act (OAA) in Germany: A Unique Collaborative Effort to Advance Online Public Services in the German Federal System
This case study describes the set up and collaboration dynamic of the Online Access Act (OAA) (Onlinezugangsgesetz). The OAA was enacted in August 2017 as a result of increasing dissatisfaction among policy makers and administrators with the slow progress of government digitalisation in Germany over the last decade. The act obliges all levels of government…
Read MoremeinBerlin: An integrative eParticipation platform for all administrative levels in Berlin
„meinBerlin” is the central eParticipation platform of the state of Berlin. Citizen participation procedures of all administrative units shall be realised via this platform, which makes meinBerlin the central ‘point of contact’ for all participation processes in Berlin. Various types of eParticipation initiatives can be conducted on the platform, including e.g. development plan procedures, public…
Read MoreDigital Transformation in German Multi-Level Governance – The Case of Digitalisation Labs on “Immigration and Emigration”
At present, the digital administrative landscape in Germany has been dominated by isolated solutions and the German Online Access Act (OZG) seeks to support harmonisation and better collaboration by creating uniform standards across administrative levels. It obliges the federal administration, the Länder and the municipalities to offer their administrative services digitally by the end of…
Read MoreeNAP: An Electronic Sustainability Assessment Tool for the Ministerial Bureaucracy in Germany
In the spring of 2018, the German government introduced a web-based tool called eNAP that aims to facilitate and improve the sustainability impact assessment (SIA) as conducted for new laws and regulations, and that can be used by ministry officials and policy makers to carry out the SIA. In Germany, evaluating potential environmental, economic and…
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