Collaborative Network Governance Framework for Aligning Open Justice and e-Justice Ecosystems for Greater Public Value

An ecosystem is a complex system of interdependent subsystems. The disjointed open justice ecosystem and the e-justice ecosystem, if they fail to coevolve and adapt to changing environments, contribute to the conundrum of understanding enablers and inhibitors for public value creation. Drawing on the formal system theory and the literature review, we developed a collaborative network governance framework for aligning ecosystems and creating public value. This framework is applied to guide case study research to identify enablers and inhibitors of strategic alignment and public value creation in the Federal Court of Australia context. We found evidence for collaborative network governance in facilitating court judges and practitioners to assimilate e-justice subsystems in open justice practice, with impacts on enhanced operational efficiency and service level. These realized economic and social values in turn provided the federal court with political return on investments in digital transformation of the court services and the legitimacy of open justice practice.