Reflexive Governance in the Contex of Digitalization: Concept and Pratical Implementation

Abstract

Following recent theoretical studies and practical implications of digitalization of public sector in Russia this article studies the concept of reflexivity and reflexive governance. We conducted a theoretical analysis of the conditions and factors that determine political agents’ reflexivity. We define ‘reflexivity’, as a property of political agents to ‘mirror, to recognize the behavior and communicative strategies on platforms which are provided by three interrelated processes: introspection, deliberation and self-organization. Reflexivity creates prerequisites for “management from within”, when a complex socio-­technical system and its agents become internal elements of the organization, carry out its interpretation and through reflexive coordination, provide co-management and down-top steering and control. The article builds logic of reflexive governance around the concept of governance and the process of policy-­making in a broader multi-­agent approach and taking into consideration a significant trend of changing the paradigm of public administration and the coordination model. From the traditional, regulative, to reflexive coordination, which provides for cooperative activities of state and non-state agents to adapt and de-institutionalize the norms governing the political system in conditions of changing expectations of actors or socio-­political context. Based on the methodology of transitional management and process analysis, we analyze the practical implementation of reflexive governance in Russian Regional Management Centers. We come to the conclusion about the primacy and super functionality of values supported by reflexive algorithms on feedback platforms. At the present stage, these values aim with the optimization and efficiency of public administration and service orientations of the executive branch (the concept of “service state 2.0” implemented by the Russian digital government). In addition, reflexive governance on the feedback platforms has predicative and proactive potential. The key goal is to anticipate and indentify the problem and to change the rules and prevent its occurrence in the future. The proactive potential of the feedback platforms develops, as the study showed, on the basis of full-scale and multi-­channel access of citizens to public deliberation. Finally, the combination of polycentric and hierarchical coordination in the Regional Management Centers ensures the preservation of managerial autonomy of regional administrations, but at the same time brings control and overall coordination of rules and regulations for dealing with “incidents” to the federal level, in order to ensure uniform national standards for responding to problems.

Acknowledgements

The research was carried out through the financial support of the Russian Scienсе Foundation, grant No 19–18–00210 “Political ontology of digitalization: Study of institutional bases for digital forms of governability”.