The fault of federalism and municipial self-governance? Germany's failed digitalization law and future insights for digitizing the public administration in a multi-level environment

The Onlinezugangsgesetz (Online Access Act), also known as the OZG, was a landmark legislation passed in Germany in 2017 with the aim of digitizing administrative services provided by federal, state and local governments. The law mandated that by the end of 2022, all administrative services in Germany should be accessible online through a single portal, thus making it easier for citizens and businesses to interact with the government. Despite the promising goals of the OZG, its implementation has been plagued by delays, bureaucratic hurdles, and technical challenges, leading to a significant gap between the intended and actual outcomes.Thus, Germany still lags behind comparable nations in respect to the digitalisation of the public sector. It seems evident that this lag is at least partly connected to Germany’s complex multi-level government structure, as the implementation of the OZG is the joint responsibility of the federal government, 16 states and over 1800 self-governing municipalities. This paper aims at specifying the relationship between the multi-level governance structure in Germany and the failure of the OZG by utilizing the “Ecology of Games” (EoG) framework originally developed by Long (1958) and later revived and applied to a number of puzzles in the field of technology and innovation policy (e.g. Dutton et al. 2012). Based on this theoretical background, this paper employs network-analytical methods to investigate and summarize insights collected through both a structured document-analysis and expert interviews. With this research design, the present paper aims at a) illustrating and comparing the different governance structures of the OZG implementation in Germany’s 16 states, b) delineating if and how these different governance structures affected the success of the OZG implementation in the respective cases and c) investigating the opportunities and restrictions resulting from different technological approaches of digitizing the public sector. This paper's results can help to identify the main barriers and challenges to the OZG implementation, and to propose strategies for improving the effectiveness of e-government initiatives in Germany and beyond.