Why farmers perceive the use of e-government services as an administrative burden: A conceptual framework on influencing factors

In many countries around the world, family farms are expected to use e-government services to handle data exchange electronically via the internet with the government to fulfill their information obligations. This paper aims to explore the factors influencing the extent to which farmers perceive the use of such services as burdensome, and to develop a framework to categorize these factors for the farming sector. To do this, we extracted a conceptual framework designed for commercial businesses and adapted it to the farming sector. We employed a qualitative case study in Switzerland and conducted face-to-face interviews with six farmers using contrast sampling. The interviews were examined by applying thematic analysis. We found influencing factors from four different fields: (1) farm and farmer characteristics (e.g., farm structure, farmer's attitude toward ICT, farmer's ICT competence, use of external support, work organization, and infrastructure), (2) usage characteristics of e-government services (e.g. quantity and frequency of data entry, and period in use), (3) perceived characteristics of e-government (e.g., network, documentation, software design, complexity, farm compatibility, and duplication), and (4) perceived farm impact (data-security). We further found that the use of e-government services has no organizational benefits for family farms. Our findings provide a conceptual framework for understanding why e-government services for farmers might contribute to either a decrease or increase in their perceived administrative burden. It further provides policy-relevant information about the factors that play a role in digital direct payment administration to reduce farmers' administrative burdens.