Text

Institutional Asymmetry in Digital Governance: How Decentralized Urban Systems in the Global South Resist Reintegration — Evidence from Jakarta, Indonesia

---

Dominant theoretical frameworks in digital governance scholarship, most notably Digital Era
Governance, anticipate that digital investment progressively produces administrative
reintegration, need-based holism, and democratic responsiveness. This expectation, however,
rests on institutional assumptions grounded in high-capacity OECD administrative systems that
do not hold in the decentralized, institutionally fragmented urban contexts that characterize the
majority of the Global South. This study examines the evolutionary trajectory of digital
governance in Jakarta, Indonesia — one of Southeast Asia's most complex metropolitan
administrations — through a PRISMA-guided systematic literature review of 25 peer-reviewed
studies published between 2017 and 2026, sourced from Scopus, Web of Science, Dimensions,
and Google Scholar. Data were analyzed through iterative thematic and axial coding. The
findings reveal that Jakarta's digital governance transformation follows a non-linear,
institutionally uneven trajectory structured across three phases: administrative service
digitalization, platform integration, and data-driven participatory governance. Across these
phases, three recurrent governance tensions were identified: an efficiency–capacity gap, a
participation–responsiveness gap, and an integration–fragmentation dynamic. To theorize these
patterns, this study introduces the concept of Institutional Asymmetry in Digital Governance,
defined as the structural and temporal imbalance in which digital innovation advances faster
than bureaucratic adaptation, regulatory coordination, and participatory institutionalization.
This concept extends Digital Era Governance theory by demonstrating that governance
reintegration in decentralized urban administrations is institutionally mediated rather than
technologically determined. The findings have direct implications for how digital governance
maturity should be assessed, sequenced, and governed in rapidly urbanizing cities: platform
sophistication alone is insufficient; institutional infrastructure — coordination capacity,
regulatory coherence, and democratic institutionalization — must develop in parallel with, not
as a by-product of, technological investment.

---

Availability

Detail Information

Series Title

-

Call Number

AR DOS 2026

Publisher

Jakarta : Institut STIAMI., 2026

Collation

-

Language

English

ISBN/ISSN

-

Classification

AR0024

Content Type

-

Media Type

-

Carrier Type

-

Edition

-

Subject(s)

Digital Governance
Institutional Asymmetry
Data-Driven Governance
Urban Governance
Global South
Systematic Literature Review
Jakarta

Specific Detail Info

-

Statement of Responsibility

-

Other version/related

File Attachment

Comments

---

You must be logged in to post a comment