Paper/Speech Details of Conference Program for the 29th NISPAcee Annual Conference Program Overview WG2: E-government (Physical) Author(s) Eduards Lielpeters University of Latvia Riga Latvia Title The presence of public administration in the digital environment and citizens digital participation in Latvia File Paper files are available only for conference participants, please login first. Presenter Eduards Lielpeters Abstract The digital environment and social media are providing new solutions for public administration to be closer to citizens and empower their ability to participate in the decision-making process. At the same time, digital transformation is also bringing new challenges that public administration has to face but not always is capable to do so. Still, it is undoubtedly that the rapid development of the digital environment will continue with or without the direct presence of public administration. Therefore, for public administration, it is better to be directly represented in the digital environment and develop it in a way that helps to strengthen democracy instead of weakening it. Hence, public administration should take a more important role in the digital transformation processes. Moving towards this position is already noticeable in the activities of the European Union institutions, but also member countries should be more proactive. In the case of Latvia, several good preconditions could help the public administration to be able to cooperate with citizens in the digital environment more successfully, still, there is a lack of common vision and direction. The goal of the paper is to analyse the current situation in Latvia and identify the biggest limitations that should be overcome to develop digital environment as a place where public administration can communicate and cooperate with citizens and successfully engage them in the decision-making process. Sequentially, the main question of the research is: what are the main limitations that public administration should overcome to foster digital participation of citizens in Latvia? Research methods that are implemented are analysis of Latvian and the EU strategies and legal documents connected with citizen participation and presence of public administration in the digital environment; review of smartphone applications that are already used in Latvia for citizen participation and cooperation with public administration; and content analysis of Facebook pages maintained by Latvian Ministries. In the content analysis is analysed entries that are published in the main Facebook pages of all 13 Latvian ministries in the six months period (July 2019 until December 2019, in total 3181 entries). Results of the analysis of Latvian and the EU strategies and legal documents are suggesting that on paper there is noticeable support to citizen participation and use of digital solutions, still, in practice, this position in Latvia is not always resulting in the implementation of real digital solutions or current activities are fragmented and project-based without common objectives and direction. Results of the content analysis are demonstrating that for now, institutions are insufficiently using two-way communication and engagement opportunities, as well as institutions are not very active in the promotion of the existing participation opportunities. Hence, there is not only a need for a more active presence in the digital environment, but it is also necessary to promote already existing participation opportunities more widely, including smartphone applications that are not sufficiently used by citizens. Therefore, one of the largest limitations that should be overcome in Latvia to foster citizen digital participation is public administrations comprehension of the value of citizen participation and the institution`s ability to use digital environment for cooperation with citizens and promotion of participation opportunities. The paper was supported by the National Research Programme project “INTERFRAME-LV”
