Creative Bureaucracy Festival meets Science: Interview Jeanette Hofmann

Germany has acquired somewhat of a reputation for lagging behind when it comes to modernising, and in particular digitalising, its public administration. When compared to leading countries like Estonia or Denmark, this gap is up to as much as 20 years, says Prof. Jeanette Hofmann, founding director of the Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society in Berlin. In her conversation with Julia Stamm, Jeanette Hofmann shares insights on why this is the case and where Germany’s biggest challenges lie when it comes to enabling effective knowledge transfer between science and policymaking. Drawing on her extensive experience as part of scientific enquiries and other processes intended to feed scientific insights into policy decision-making, she points out where positive steps forward have already been taken and where inherent dilemmas make progress hard. She also highlights possible ideas for scaling “lighthouse” project successes to wider scale transformation.