Towards a Relational Mode of Governance: Protocols as Europe’s Digital Governance Infrastructure

Two major reports by Enrico Letta and Mario Draghi echo that same urgency as von der Leyen. Letta calls for a reimagining of the Single Market, beyond goods and services, toward a deeper integration of knowledge, data, and infrastructure. Draghi emphasizes the need for coordinated governance and long-term investments to close Europe’s innovation gap and overcome institution fragmentation. Both voices converge on a shared insight: Europe’s challenge is not just economic or technological, it is infrastructural. Europe’s digital potential remains untapped without trusted, interoperable infrastructure. This becomes particularly evident in the debate surrounding the so-called EuroStack, where digital sovereignty underscores the deeper need for a coherent, future-proof digital foundation. 

Historically, public administrations laid the foundations of Europe’s physical infrastructure, roads, energy grids, and telecommunications. Today, that legacy must be extended into the digital realm. But doing so requires moving beyond an outdated paradigm. Infrastructure is no longer just about physical assets, it is increasingly understood as relational: Something that emerges through social and institutional practices.

This evolved view, articulated early by Susan Leigh Star and Karen Ruhleder and more recently by institutions like UCL’s Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose and Cambridge’s Bennett Institute, highlights that infrastructure also includes cultural, human, and digital dimensions. Europe’s digital public services exemplify this shift. As the Communication on the Interoperable Europe Act rightly puts it, public administration functions as a “network of networks” of largely sovereign actors operating across multiple levels of government.

Despite significant progress reflected in the 2025 Report on the State of the Digital Decade, supported by initiatives such as the wide-ranging common EU interoperability acquis of cooperation practices, the Single Digital Gateway and the eJustice environment, many institutions still struggle with user-centricity, interoperability, and innovation readiness, as shown in the eGovernment Benchmark Report.

 

This strategic gap has far-reaching implications. Public Procurement alone accounts for around €2 trillion annually - approximately 14% of the EU’s GDP - making the public sector an economic powerhouse.  Smart procurement is a strategic lever, driving economic efficiency, supporting green and digital transitions, and fostering reuse across sectors and borders. But without shared infrastructure, buyers can't coordinate demand, scale innovation, or ensure transparency. Infrastructure and procurement form a reinforcing cycle: investing in digital public infrastructure is key not just to modernization, but to Europe’s democratic resilience and technological sovereignty. As the European Commission rightly states, we must adopt a systemic interoperability-by-design approach to policymaking.

However, unlocking Europe’s digital potential requires shared rules of interaction. In the digital realm, such rules are increasingly taking the form of protocols: Emerging from real-world implementation, these protocols capture procedural knowledge and make it reusable.

Unlike policies, which define broader political intent, protocols are not rigid, immutable standards, but rather modular, context-aware building blocks. But as Kerber et al. warn, premature or overly rigid standards risk locking in technologies before markets, and societies, have had time to mature. Even harmonised standards can result in a lack of uptake when governance is not fully coordinated.
This highlights a fundamental insight: Interoperability cannot be engineered solely through top-down protocols. Unlike roads, which last for decades once built, protocols require ongoing interaction, iteration, and stewardship. 

This is where GovTech assumes a central role, which the European Commission defines as “a technology-based cooperation between public and private sector actors supporting public sector digital transformation”. 

Digital public infrastructure must be cultivated. It requires dedicated local ecosystem orchestrators, actors who can mediate between high-level policy goals and local implementation realities. The later proposed GovTech Centres of Excellence act as such interfaces to the local ecosystems in the Member States. Their role is to work closely with administrations, startups, and civil society to identify process innovations, structure them as protocols, and feed them into the wider European ecosystem over the digital GovTech Platform. The GovTech Platform provides the digital layer that links the Centres. It serves as a shared registry, co-creation space, and distribution infrastructure for protocols across Europe.

This configuration creates a dense network of networks: The Centres as nodes, the Platform as edges. Each Centre contributes to, and draws from, a common knowledge base (GovTech Platform). Protocols can be adapted to local legal and administrative contexts, re-implemented, and improved. In this way, GovTech can help unlock Europe’s “Digital Double Dividend” and lubricate its single market by transforming innovation potential into systemic impact. However, without coherent governance, efforts remain isolated and underused, failing to scale up. 

A protocol-based governance model is particularly well-suited to the European context, where digital sovereignty and subsidiarity must be carefully balanced. A prominent European example is the Once-Only Technical System (OOTS), part of the Single Digital Gateway initiative. Instead of creating a centralized EU database, OOTS allows national administrations to request, receive, and reuse citizen or business data across borders. This moves Europe towards a shared digital public infrastructure without erasing local autonomy. Protocols can bring together the currently disparate elements of legal, organizational, semantic, and technical interoperability, as defined in the EIF. They acknowledge that the order of priorities matters, different architectural outcomes arise from different foundational goals. As the Interoperable Europe logic emphasizes, "Public administrations can only be interoperable if the right assessments and choices are made early on in the policy design phase."

In a fast-changing environment, trust and understanding are built through shared practices, not just regulation. Instead of a top-down, "pull" mechanism from the Commission, like the monitoring and evaluation outlined in Article 20 of the Interoperable Europe Act, protocols enable a "push" mechanism by Member States. Existing standards, like those from KoSIT or the Nordic Institute for Interoperability Solutions, can gain broader traction when embedded in shared process logic. This community-driven, co-creative approach is reminiscent of the RFC process, empowering all levels in the Member States and the ecosystem to contribute and excel based on the effectiveness and efficiency of their solutions. Just as "the early internet involved many different protocols—instructions and standards that anyone could then use to build a compatible interface," this model allows for diverse contributions. When integrated with existing mechanisms like the Interoperable Europe Act’s “interoperable Europe solutions” and the National Interoperability Framework Observatory (NIFO), this "push" approach can truly bring the framework to life. 

Just as protocols provide the operational layer for alignment, the Interoperable Europe Act offers the enabling framework to scale it. Europe does not lack talent, capital, or technology, it lacks shared process logic. As PSD2 triggered a fabric-level transformation in FinTech by opening up regulated collaboration, the Interoperable Europe Act can become a similar accelerator for GovTech: Not by imposing tools, but by fostering a protocol-based, relational governance model that turns fragmentation into federation.

Yet acceleration and governance alone are insufficient. Without concrete adoption and hands-on implementation, shared logic remains theoretical. Rather than creating new entities from scratch, the Commission should build on existing structures. I propose awarding the label of GovTech Centre of Excellence to existing institutions in the Member States that are publicly anchored actors, such as Innovation Procurement Hubs, European Digital Innovation Hubs (EDIHs), or similar initiatives, which already support digital transformation in the public sector. These institutions should work closely with the European Innovation Council (EIC) and The European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT).

These Centres would not require new physical infrastructure but would bring together existing capacities under the unified European brand (GovTech Centres of Excellence). This common identity would foster cohesion and a sense of belonging to a European public innovation ecosystem, while signalling trust and quality across Member States. The Centres would be legally structured f.e. as non-profit associations with multi-stakeholder governance, involving national ministries, regional authorities, academia, SMEs, and civil society. Acting as ecosystem brokers: they would work with local administrations to facilitate procurement-ready innovation, and support the uptake of interoperable, trustworthy digital solutions. Crucially, these Centres would not merely promote existing tools, they would propose protocols. 

To coordinate these efforts, the Centres would be networked through a shared digital abstraction layer: the GovTech Platform. Designed as a modular, headless, API-first infrastructure, this platform would act as a common registry for protocols, a co-creation environment, and an access point for guides and templates. Rather than replacing local systems, it connects them. Each Centre would be able to access existing protocols, adapt them to national or regional (legal) frameworks, and contribute improved versions back into the system. Over time, this will create a living architecture of cooperation, one that links Europe’s diversity through shared, pragmatic logic rather than through uniform mandates.

This architecture allows each Member State to adopt the most efficient processes for its own administration, while simultaneously benefitting from collective intelligence and support. Through the Centres of Excellence and the wider ecosystem, administrations gain access to shared knowledge, reusable protocols, and peer learning. On the European level, this fosters a deeper integration process, without imposing rigid uniformity. The system is inherently agile: it can rapidly respond to emerging technologies and shifting needs while remaining more stable than short-lived tech hypes and more adaptive than slow-moving policy cycles. This balance of subsidiarity, interoperability, and responsiveness is essential to future-proof digital governance.

The platform and protocols would be governed by the Interoperable Europe Board, which would serve as the central orchestration body. Beneath it, topic-specific working groups would be formed around individual protocols or domains. Members would be nominated by the GovTech Centres of Excellence and selected from their respective national ecosystems. Participation would not be limited to civil servants: actors from civil society, academia, or the private sector may contribute, as long as they are delegated by a Centre. This ensures that protocol development remains agile, practice-driven, and open to diverse expertise. 

In order to institutionalize and sustain this network over time, it is necessary to explore appropriate legal and funding frameworks 

Long-term support and visibility could be provided by a Joint Undertaking under Article 187 TFEU, a European Digital Infrastructure Consortium (EDIC), or a dedicated European Partnership under Horizon Europe. Ongoing initiatives such as the IMPACTS EDIC or the Digital Commons EDIC may offer concrete implementation pathways.

Ultimately, if Europe is to lead in public sector innovation, it must not only build digital systems, but also fundamentally reimagine how we govern them. Relational Protocol-based governance offers a new compass for this transformation: It creates a trust architecture, one that aligns values with architectures and systems with sovereignty. As noted in the opening lines of RFC 1958: “Principles that seemed inviolable a few years ago are deprecated today. Principles that seem sacred today will be deprecated tomorrow.” The only principle that endures, they argued, is the principle of constant change. As Ursula von der Leyen noted, “the world is changing, so must we.” That change begins with how Europe governs its own transformation.

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