Infrastructural Tuning in Public-Private Partnerships

In this paper, we study a public-private digital infrastructure to understand the dynamics of its emergence. We explore the interrelation of architectural and governance aspects of the infrastructure, through a longitudinal, embedded case study of the Norwegian Welfare Technology project. We introduce the concept of infrastructural tuning to conceptualize a dynamic of resistance and accommodation over time between the infrastructure’s architecture and implementation and multiple actors’ interests, policy goals and emerging opportunities and challenges. Our study makes three contributions: first, based on the analysis of our case study we provide an understanding of how the architecture of a digital infrastructure can accommodate divergent perspectives and strategies in public-private partnerships; second, we provide a process perspective on digital transformation of the public sector by analyzing the tuning process of the architecture-governance interplay; third, we develop the concept of infrastructural tuning. organized into three phases according to the three ar-chitecture-governance configurations of the infrastructure project. For each phase, we describe the core policy problem, envisioned architecture, and implementation, and we analyse it as tuning by foregrounding the resistance and accommodation dynamics.