The paper provides a case study of the implementation of "Once-Only" principle in Europe, where a related large-scale initiative began in 2017 for the first time. The project aims to explore and demonstrate the "Once-Only" principle in practice through multiple sustainable pilots using federated architecture on a cross-border European scale, connecting 60 systems across countries involved. Drivers and barriers (such as data protection and data-sharing requirements, implementation costs, public sector silo issues, legal barriers and/or gaps) are identified as well as the benefits and impacts, both tangible and intangible. The generic approach developed brings along a significant reduction in the cost of future "Once-Only" based e-services globally.

The paper maps and analyzes all existing practical exercises aiming to develop indicators for public sector innovations. To our knowledge this is the first attempt to comprehensively gather information about various international efforts. We only considered such exercises where actual indicators were developed and used at least once. We map five such exercises through extensive desk research and 13 interviews with surveyed project members. The paper shows that all existing attempts to measure public sector innovations operate within a rather limited conception of the public sector (efficiency), neglecting other possible logics (e.g. legitimacy); the existing exercises also neglect large areas of public sector activities, e.g. cooperation with business and third sectors (such as service co-creation, public-private partnership practices). This narrow focus often dictates that indicators and their technical assumptions are copied from the private sector; none of the five analyzed exercises utilized public administration experience and research (e.g. on performance measurement). The paper argues that instead of trying to come up with quantified indicators, public sector innovations should be assessed in complex evaluation frameworks.

No abstract

Her main research interests are fiscal policy, public budgeting, and public management reforms.

The paper investigates the implications of governmental cutback strategies related to the recent fiscal crisis at agency level in Estonia and Latvia. For this purpose, the article applies a comparative case study approach, through a purposeful selection of five agencies -three in Estonia and two in Latvia -to map the maximum possible variation of before-and-after effects of the crisis on organizational responses and individual-level coping. The selected agencies represent a range of regulatory and social policy domains directly and severely affected by the crisis through budget cuts and increased demand for services, and therefore most affected by the crisis. The study demonstrates that the budget cuts imposed by the cabinets of both countries and widely praised internationally actually left agency-level actors in an extremely difficult situation. Centrally imposed across-the-board cuts resulted in diverse public service gaps, leading to a range of hardships for the citizens, and therefore turning out to be neither equal nor fair for the target groups. The study concludes that centrally decided cutbacks shifted the burden to street-level bureaucrats, who in turn took on the role of key policy actors by ensuring the delivery of public services during the fiscal crisis.