Untangling the Digital Governance Landscape of the European Union: A Framework and Application to Digital

The digital governance landscape is increasingly complex. In the European Union, where numerous strategies, legislations and instruments trickle down to the level of Member States, the policy mix yields a picture that is hard to discern. Based on a mapping exercise, we propose a three-dimensional framework for digital governance interventions. The framework is inductively developed based on workshops and expert interviews and features three dimensions: pillars of digital governance, levels of policy interventions, and digital technologies. The proposed framework is dynamic in its propensity to grow in the depth of pillars and levels of interventions, as well as to consider additional technologies. We evaluate it ex ante by applying it to three technologies. Drawing on interviews with policy practitioners, we conclude that the value provided by the framework is in its capacity to reduce complexity, to make sense of a term that has become overly vague and diffuse over time, and to apply it to identify ‘white spots’.