Inventory of eGovernment Barriers
A structured catalogue of legal, organisational, and technical obstacles to European public e-services, built from cross-national research and expert analysis.
Foundations & Country Examples
Understanding the Obstacles
The Inventory documents barriers that hindered the delivery and adoption of eGovernment services across Europe during the project's research period (2005–2008). It is organised into two complementary layers: cross-cutting foundations that address systemic legal and policy challenges, and country examples that illustrate how those barriers manifested in specific national contexts.
Each entry provides a description of the barrier, its context, and references to relevant resources — offering a practical reference for researchers, policymakers, and public-sector practitioners.
Foundations
Cross-Cutting Barrier Themes
The foundations layer captures legal and policy dimensions that affected eGovernment development across multiple member states. These themes emerged from workshops, expert consultations, and comparative analysis conducted by the project team.
Intellectual Property Rights (IPR)
Uncertainty around ownership, licensing, and reuse of digital content created barriers to sharing public-sector information and developing interoperable e-services.
Liability
Questions about legal responsibility for online transactions, data accuracy, and service failure slowed the deployment of transactional eGovernment services.
Public Administration Transparency
Lack of clarity in administrative processes and decision-making undermined trust and made it harder to redesign services for digital delivery.
Country Examples
Barriers in National Context
The country examples illustrate how the foundational barriers played out in specific national projects and initiatives. These cases were drawn from across the European Union and informed the project's final recommendations.
| Country | Example | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Hungary | National Archives of Hungary — e-Archivum | Explored challenges around digital preservation, IPR, and long-term accessibility of electronic public records within a national archival framework. |
| Estonia | Public Sector Spatial Data Infrastructures | Examined obstacles to sharing geospatial data across public agencies, including interoperability standards and data-ownership concerns. |
| Netherlands | Nationaal Archief | Investigated barriers related to the digitisation of national archival holdings and the provision of online access to historical government records. |
Further Reading
Explore Related Outputs
The Inventory was developed alongside other project workstreams. Good-practice case studies, workshop findings, and the final recommendations published in January 2008 provide additional context for the barriers documented here.