E-governance, as a field of study, sits at the intersection of public administration theory, information systems research, and political science. It asks not merely whether a government has a portal or an app, but how digital tools alter the relationship between the state and the citizen, how bureaucratic incentives shift when services are automated, and how accountability functions when decisions are mediated by software. The book under review positions itself across both theory and application, a pairing that the review treats as one of its notable strengths, since many works in the field tend to privilege one side of that divide at the expense of the other.

One of the intellectual anchors visible in the review’s framing is the technology acceptance model, originally developed by F. D. Davis in 1989. The model, among the most cited frameworks in information systems research, holds that two perceptions largely determine whether users adopt a new technology: perceived usefulness, the belief that the tool will improve performance, and perceived ease of use, the belief that operating it will be free of excessive effort. Applied to government services, the model raises an uncomfortable question for digital transformation programs. A citizen who finds an online tax portal confusing, or a civil servant who sees no efficiency gain in a new workflow system, will quietly abandon the technology no matter how ambitious the policy announcement behind it was.

The review’s reference list also points to the role of trust, drawing on work by Gefen and Straub on trust and the technology acceptance model in online shopping, and on McKnight, Choudhury, and Kacmar’s 2002 typology of trust measures for e-commerce. That lineage matters because the stakes differ sharply between buying a book online and interacting with a state. Trust in an e-commerce platform concerns whether a transaction will complete as promised. Trust in e-governance concerns whether personal data will be protected, whether an algorithmic decision can be contested, and whether the digital interface is a genuine channel of the state or a barrier placed in front of it. Scholars in the field have long argued that without institution-based trust, the adoption curves of government technology flatten regardless of usability.

A third theoretical pillar is Everett Rogers’s diffusion of innovations, in its fifth edition from 2003, which also appears among the works cited in the review. Rogers’s framework describes how innovations spread through social systems over time, carried first by innovators and early adopters and only later reaching the early and late majorities, with the laggards arriving last, if at all. Transposed to the public sector, the framework helps explain why digital government initiatives so often produce uneven outcomes. A national identity system may be embraced in capital cities while failing to penetrate rural regions, not because the technology is deficient but because the diffusion process depends on communication channels, social networks, and the perceived compatibility of the innovation with existing values and practices.

The review connects these classic frameworks to contemporary developments in the journal’s own pages. Among the works it cites is a 2024 study by Menke, Gomes, and Xavier on the impacts of AI-based anti-corruption audits on risk aversion in decision-making, using Brazil’s ALICE tool as a case study. ALICE applies artificial intelligence to detect anomalies in public procurement, one of the most corruption-prone areas of government activity. The study’s findings on how such audits change the behavior of officials, making them more risk-averse in their decisions, illustrate a theme that runs through the modern e-governance literature: technology does not merely make administration faster, it reshapes the incentives and even the psychology of the people inside the bureaucracy.

Another cited contribution, W. Potipiroon’s 2024 analysis of the TikTok ban votes in the United States House of Representatives, pushes the discussion beyond administration and into technopolitics, the terrain where governments regulate, restrict, and weaponize the same digital platforms that citizens use daily. The inclusion of such work in the review’s frame signals that e-governance can no longer be understood as a one-way story of states adopting tools. States are also actors in a contested digital ecosystem, weighing national security against platform economies, and their choices feed back into public trust in every government technology initiative.

The journal hosting the review, Global Public Policy and Governance, is published by Springer Nature under the exclusive license of the Institute for Global Public Policy at Fudan University, and its scope spans e-governance, public administration theory, science and technology governance, and technopolitics. That breadth is deliberate. The questions raised by Trotta’s book, and by Zhao’s assessment of it, do not respect the boundary between domestic administration and international affairs. A data localization rule in one country affects cloud providers on other continents. An identity platform designed for service delivery can become an instrument of surveillance. The field’s journals increasingly treat these as a single, connected problem set.

What makes the review timely, beyond its scholarly content, is the trajectory of the field it surveys. Since the book’s 2018 publication, governments worldwide have deployed artificial intelligence for everything from fraud detection to chatbot citizen services, while simultaneously confronting the governance failures those deployments can produce, including biased algorithms, opaque automated decisions, and data breaches. The theoretical toolkit highlighted in the review, spanning acceptance models, trust typologies, and diffusion theory, was largely built for an era of websites and portals. Whether those frameworks can carry the weight of generative AI in the public sector is now one of the field’s open questions, and reviews like this one serve as checkpoints on how well the existing literature has prepared researchers for that transition.

For readers outside academia, the practical takeaway is that the success of digital government is not primarily a technical achievement. It is a behavioral and institutional one, resting on whether citizens find digital services useful and easy, whether they trust the institutions behind the interfaces, and whether innovations diffuse through society rather than stalling among early adopters. The review of Advances in E-governance, published as Global Public Policy and Governance Volume 5, pages 82 to 86, consolidates a body of theory that has quietly shaped how governments around the world build their digital faces, and it underscores that the hardest problems in e-governance are the oldest ones in public administration: trust, legitimacy, and the enduring challenge of making institutions work for the people they serve.

Subject of Research: A scholarly review of a book on the theory and application of e-governance technological initiatives

Article Title: Trotta, A. M. (2018). Advances in E-governance: Theory and application of technological initiatives. Routledge

Article References: Zhao, B. (2025). Trotta, A. M. (2018). Advances in E-governance: Theory and application of technological initiatives. Routledge. Global Public Policy and Governance, 5(1), 82-86. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43508-025-00111-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43508-025-00111-1

Keywords: e-governance, public administration, digital government, technology acceptance model, trust, diffusion of innovations, artificial intelligence, anti-corruption, technopolitics, book review, public policy, digital transformation

The urgency of the work is grounded in sobering data. A 2022 survey by the Tallinn Municipal Police Department found that apartment associations in the Estonian capital are largely unprepared for crises. Of 694 respondents, 80 percent had not mapped alternative solutions or backup systems for utility failures, more than 90 percent had not considered alternative heating options, and 76 percent had no plan for water or sewage outages. Yet 90.5 percent of buildings ensure systematic access to technical infrastructure rooms, and 80 percent maintain resident contact information for emergencies. With approximately 6,575 apartment associations registered in Tallinn and 96 percent of Estonian apartments privatized and managed through such associations, these organizations represent an enormous, largely untapped resource for community resilience.

The research team employed an exploratory, design-oriented case study informed by principles of Action Design Research, combining a World-Café-style participatory workshop with older residents, expert consultations with crisis managers, and analysis of secondary data. The workshop, held in January 2023 at the Kristiine Activity Center, gathered 30 anonymous written responses from older adults, 90 percent of whom were over 70 years old and 60 percent of whom lived alone. The findings revealed striking gaps in crisis awareness: 63 percent did not know the locations of public shelters, 43 percent did not know which phone number to call in danger, and only 41 percent reported access to a shelter. Ten percent of participants did not even live at the address listed in the national Population Register, underscoring the data-quality problems that plague emergency planning.

Communication preferences proved equally revealing. When asked how they would want to receive crisis information, 70 percent chose radio, 67 percent television, 67 percent SMS, and 60 percent phone calls, while only 40 percent selected official websites. More than half did not use the internet daily, and 41 percent had no email account. Trust patterns were equally instructive: Tallinn City was the most trusted information source at 66 percent, followed by state institutions at 41 percent, while social media ranked last at 21 percent. These results point decisively toward a hybrid, multi-channel communication strategy rather than a purely digital portal, with apartment associations acting as trusted local intermediaries between municipal authorities and residents.

Expert consultations with the Tallinn Municipal Police Department reinforced the institutional side of the problem. Crisis managers emphasized that during emergencies the state delegates numerous tasks to municipalities, yet they lack reliable, up-to-date databases on apartment associations, their contact persons, building resources, and preparedness levels. Existing registers, including the e-Business Register, often contain outdated information. Experts also highlighted the difficulty of identifying residents who need extra help during evacuations, since population registers lack accurate residence data and details on vulnerable groups, a problem compounded by frequent apartment rentals and limited contact between landlords and housing associations.

The centerpiece of the study is the Coordination Framework for Municipal-Apartment Association Crisis Preparedness, or C-MAACP Framework, a conceptual e-service that integrates six core elements: municipal coordination, apartment-association participation, register-supported information management, privacy-aware access, preparedness-status visualization, and multi-channel communication. Built on Estonia’s X-Road data exchange layer, the platform would aggregate data from national registers including the Social Services and Benefits Data Register, the e-Population Register, the e-Business Register, and the e-Land Register. Apartment associations would upload building-specific information, crisis plans, resource descriptions, and resident contact lists, while municipalities would assign each building a color-coded preparedness rating: green for self-sufficient, yellow for needing development, and red for high-risk buildings requiring external support.

Privacy emerges as a central design constraint rather than an afterthought. The framework employs a two-tier, role-based access model aligned with GDPR principles of purpose limitation and data minimization. Apartment associations would see only task-relevant, aggregated preparedness information, while identifiable or vulnerability-related data would remain restricted to authorized municipal or rescue-service roles with a clear legal basis. The researchers note that even aggregated indicators can become re-identifiable in small apartment buildings, requiring threshold rules, suppression of small-cell outputs, and audit trails. A full legal analysis and Data Protection Impact Assessment would be mandatory before any deployment.

A formative evaluation with experts from the Estonian Rescue Services Agency and the Tallinn Municipal Police Department confirmed that no comparable e-service exists today and that the concept addresses a genuine operational need. Experts suggested the tool could save significant work time for the Rescue Board, whose shelter assessments currently rely on home visits, and recommended involving the Estonian Union of Co-operative Housing Associations in future prototype testing. However, they also flagged unresolved challenges: data protection questions, development costs, the difficulty of motivating voluntary apartment associations to participate, and the technical complexity of interfacing with multiple state databases. Critically, they asked how the system would function during long-term power or internet outages, a scenario the framework must address through resilient fallback procedures.

The study’s broader significance extends beyond Estonia. The researchers argue that municipal crisis preparedness is fundamentally a socio-technical coordination problem, not merely a database integration exercise. Their design principles, connecting public-sector data infrastructures, local community intermediaries, trusted multi-channel communication, and privacy-aware governance, are transferable to any municipality that must coordinate digital systems with grassroots organizations and vulnerable residents. In less digitally mature contexts, the same logic could apply with more manual data updating and stronger reliance on community networks. The authors are careful to position the framework as a concept rather than a tested system: prototype development, legal analysis, and empirical evaluation with apartment associations, municipal users, and rescue services remain essential next steps before any claims about operational effectiveness can be made.

As Europe’s population ages, with the number of people aged 60 or above projected to reach 1.4 billion globally by 2030, the challenge of reaching older residents during emergencies will only intensify. Estonia, with 99 percent of public services available online around the clock, offers an unusually favorable testing ground for solutions that bridge high-tech infrastructure and low-tech human realities. The C-MAACP Framework suggests that the future of crisis communication may depend less on building new apps and more on weaving together the registers, institutions, and neighborhood associations that already exist, ensuring that when the next crisis comes, no building and no resident is left invisible.

Subject of Research: Designing e-services to improve crisis communication and preparedness cooperation between local municipalities and apartment associations

Article Title: Designing E-Services for Improving Crisis Communication in Local Municipalities: Cooperation with Apartment Associations

Article References: Riibe, J., Hassan, J. M., Sharma, R., Lips, S., & Draheim, D. (2026). Designing E-Services for Improving Crisis Communication in Local Municipalities: Cooperation with Apartment Associations. Information Systems Frontiers. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10796-026-10811-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10796-026-10811-6

Keywords: crisis management, e-services, apartment associations, municipal crisis preparedness, digital crisis communication, emergency evacuation, e-governance, X-Road, privacy-by-design, older adults, Estonia, action design research