Introducing a digital tool for sustainability impact assessments within the German Federal Government: A neo-institutional perspective
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/00208523211047093 |
| Published date | 01 June 2023 |
| Date | 01 June 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Introducing a digital tool
for sustainability impact
assessments within the
German Federal
Government: A neo-
institutional perspective
Camilla Wanckel
University of Potsdam, Germany
Abstract
This study examines the institutionalization of information technologies for policy for-
mulation by investigating the case of eNAP. The digital tool was introduced in the spring
of 2018 with the aim of supporting and improving sustainability impact assessments
(SIAs) within the German Federal Government. Applying a neo-institutional perspective,
this study shows how a tool like eNAP is embedded into prevailing regulative, norma-
tive, and cultural–cognitive structures. Findings from 10 semi-structured interviews indi-
cate that the application of eNAP varies according to intra-ministerial coordination
practices and portfolio-specific information-processing schemata. Overall, the tool
serves to translate the abstract regulation to conduct an SIA, as well as to translate
the vague norm of “sustainability”into a concrete assessment requirement, thereby
helping increase policy officials’awareness of sustainability goals. However, consistent
with previous studies, great importance is not attached to SIAs in policy formulation,
and prevailing norms and routines make the implementation of eNAP to increase the
use of evidence or in-depth considerations of policy alternatives and their consequences
unlikely.
Points for practitioners
Information and communication technologies (ICTs) provide new opportunities to
support ex-ante policy evaluations. Practitioners enforcing ICTs for impact
Corresponding author:
Camilla Wanckel, Chair for German Politics and Government, University of Potsdam, August-Bebel-Straße 89,
Potsdam, Brandenburg 14482, Germany.
Email: cwanckel@uni-potsdam.de
Article
International
Review of
Administrative
Sciences
International Review of Administrative
Sciences
2023, Vol. 89(2) 433–449
© The Author(s) 2021
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/00208523211047093
journals.sagepub.com/home/ras
assessments should take a comprehensive perspective on the institutional context
because both formal organizational structures and implicit expectations, habits and
routines affect how policy officials use these tools. Technology alone does not
improve policy evaluations, and a misfit between regulati ve, normative an d cul-
tural–cognitive institutional elements can lead to merely symbolic displays of impact
assessments through the means of digital tools.
Keywords
ICTs, ministerial bureaucracies, impact assessment, sustainability, neo-institutionalism,
policy formulation
Introduction
Regulatory impact assessments (RIAs) are an important element of Better Regulation
reform efforts and involve the ex-ante evaluation of policy proposals’consequences,
both intended and unintended. Over the last three decades, the use of RIAs has
rapidly expanded across OECD and EU member states and is regarded as a key instru-
ment to achieve better-informed, effective and transparent decision-making (Adelle and
Weiland, 2012). Yet research on the practical implementation of RIAs has identified a
variety of difficulties, ranging from a lack of resources to insufficient organizational and
political support, which often result in an assessment procedure of low quality
and narrow scope. These deficits also concern sustainability impact assessments
(SIAs) that are additionally challenging because, first, the complex and multidimen-
sional character of sustainability entails a considerable degree of uncertainty about
policy consequences and, second, the assessment of long-term impacts depends on
the underlying assumptions about causal relationships between different UN
Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) (Jacob et al., 2009). In the digital governance
era, information and communication technologies (ICTs), defined as a diverse set of
electronic tools to “transmit, process, store, create, display, share or exchange informa-
tion”(UNESCO, 2007: 1), provide new opportunities to support policy formulation
processes and have been argued to enable the assessment of a wider range of policy
alternatives and their consequences (Höchtl et al., 2016).
In 2018, the German Federal Government introduced an electronic sustainability
assessment tool called eNAP that was developed to help policy officials assess the
impact of a regulatory proposal and identify potential interdependencies with other pol-
icies based on the goals of the Sustainability Strategy (German Federal Government,
2018a, 2018b). eNAP is the first prototype of a larger RIA module created in collabor-
ation with the Federal Chancellery and the Federal Ministry of the Interior, Building
and Community (hereinafter referred to as the Federal Ministry of the Interior) and one
of the first ICT tools designed to facilitate SIAs in European countries. This tool thus
allows for unique insights into the challenges and opportunities of institutionalizing
ICTs for prospective policy evaluations.
434 International Review of Administrative Sciences 89(2)
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