The digital turn of the public sector: the role of IOs in shaping meanings and principles

In the framework of the social construction theory of policy design, this work investigates how IOs, and especially the UN, OECD and EU, have been shaping digitalization in the last seventy years, with a specific focus on the public sector. To do so, N=96 documents were examined, of hard, soft law and "white" nature, since the year of foundation of the three IOs until July 2023. Categories employed were types of sources, definitions and employment of terms and principles and objectives. In sum, it was observed that the UN has mainly addressed digitalization through soft legal sources from a human-rights based perspective, and only minorly addressed public sector digitalization. The OECD has mainly used research papers and reports, to which growth and good management principles have been mostly attached. Finally, the EU has employed strict legally binding definitions for technical features, but only broader ones in softer forms for the public sector. While principles were mainly growth-related at the beginning of the century, they have become more balanced with human-rights in the last decade. Generally, while e-government was the most common term in the 2000s, digital transformation and digital government have been challenging the terminological status quo. Differences in how the three IOs have been shaping digitalization, specifically in the public sector, can be explained by their different mandates and legal capacity. Future research should try to diversify the plethora of IOs and zoom on the COVID-19 pandemic.