Digital Public Services as Reconfigured Arenas of Government–Citizen Encounter: Evaluating Institutional Policy Reform through Georgia's Unified E-Service Portal

Digital public services are increasingly positioned at the centre of public administration reform, yet their governance implications remain systematically underexamined. This article analyses digital public services not as technical delivery tools, but as reconfigured arenas of government–citisen encounter that reshape authority, accountability, and institutional capacity. Focusing on Georgia’s unified electronic services portal, MY.GOV.GE, the study evaluates how digital portals operate as governance infrastructure within a transitional administrative context. The analysis combines institutional theory and policy implementation research with the NASSS framework to examine how complexity accumulates across legal, organisational, and political domains as digital reforms expand. Rather than assessing technological performance or service uptake alone, the article interrogates how interface-level integration coexists with fragmented authority, uneven organisational capacity, and constrained governance arrangements at the institutional level. The findings indicate that MY.GOV.GE has delivered substantial improvements in access, procedural standardisation, and administrative visibility. At the same time, institutional consolidation has not kept pace with interface integration. Authority, accountability, and service ownership remain dispersed across organisations, producing a governance configuration in which access is centralised while responsibility remains fragmented. Applying NASSS reveals that the primary constraints on reform sustainability are institutional rather than technological, with governance pressure redistributed into administrative systems with limited capacity to absorb complexity. The article contributes by reframing unified service portals as governance infrastructure, extending NASSS as an institutional policy analysis framework, and offering a context-sensitive assessment of digital reform durability in transitional states.