Public procurement as a GovTech governance interface

Abstract

Public digital government is increasingly mediated through market-facing GovTech arrangements, in which public organizations engage private suppliers, platforms, startups, and service providers to develop and maintain digital systems. While such arrangements are often associated with innovation and administrative capacity, they also raise questions about accountability, democratic control, public value, and long-term dependency. Public procurement is central to these arrangements, yet it is often treated as a procedural or legal background condition rather than as an analytical mechanism through which public–private relations are structured. This paper presents a focused structured review and conceptual positioning of a bounded corpus of nine journal articles identified through searches in Scopus and Web of Science and analyzed through thematic synthesis. Rather than claiming to map the full literature on public procurement or digital government, the paper examines how procurement is treated in GovTech-related and digital government research and what this reveals about its governance role. The review identifies three recurring patterns. Procurement is framed, first, as a mechanism for governance and transparency through platforms, data, and standardization; second, as part of the long-term governance of mission-critical digital infrastructures and backbone systems; and third, as a mode of public–private governance through contracts, outsourcing, partnerships, and innovation-oriented arrangements. Based on these patterns, the paper argues that public procurement can be understood as a GovTech governance interface: an institutional site where public goals are translated into requirements, contractual obligations, delivery arrangements, and supplier relations. The paper contributes by sharpening the conceptual role of procurement in GovTech research and by outlining an agenda for studying strategic procurement, public value, accountability, digital sovereignty, and long-term public capacity.