THE PREDICAMENT OF PUBLICNESS IN DIGITAL PUBLIC GOVERNANCE AND ITS NORMATIVE RESPONSE

Abstract

The relentless integration of digital technologies into public governance has yielded substantial gains in efficiency, responsiveness, and administrative reach. Yet beneath these achievements lies a deepening normative concern: is digital public governance becoming more efficient at the cost of becoming less public? This article offers a normative analysis of the predicament of publicness in the age of digital governance, arguing that the core values constitutive of public administration — fairness, accountability, procedural integrity, and democratic responsiveness — are being systematically eroded by three interrelated dynamics: the ascendancy of technological logic that subordinates public values to efficiency metrics; the concentration of data power that creates unprecedented asymmetries between state and citizen; and the proliferation of algorithmic decision-making that fragments responsibility and diminishes administrative judgment. Drawing on the intellectual resources of public administration theory, critical theory, and philosophy of technology, the article traces these predicaments to three deeper structural causes: the overexpansion of instrumental rationality, the institutional lag accompanying technological acceleration, and the dehumanizing tendency inherent in digitally mediated administration. The article then advances four normative pathways for reclaiming publicness: value reorientation through a multi-dimensional evaluative framework, institutional reconstruction that constrains algorithmic power with procedural justice, the cultivation of ethical judgment among public administrators, and the use of digital platforms to expand rather than replace democratic participation. The article concludes that the central challenge of digital public governance is not technical but normative: to ensure that the digital transformation of the state serves, rather than subverts, the public interest.