Systematic Artefact-Based Review of Government Digital Identity Programmes: Alignment, Maturity and Transparency

Digital identity is increasingly treated as foundational infrastructure for digital economies and public services, yet national approaches remain fragmented and difficult to compare. This study presents a PRISMA-guided systematic artefact-based review of government digital identity programmes, using programme-relevant government artefacts as the review corpus, including strategies, trust frameworks, guidance, service documentation, and identity-enabled public-service materials. Adapting an NLP pipeline for large-scale digital identity text analysis, the study identifies recurring themes, constructs comparative programme profiles, and operationalises three artefact-based measures: alignment, transparency, and maturity. Rather than assessing innovation performance or operational system quality directly, it examines the documentary layer through which programmes are described, justified, and made comparable. The analysis reveals substantial variation in how highly digitalised societies articulate governance, trust, interoperability, security, privacy, and service delivery. The review contributes a repeatable artefact-based framework for cross-jurisdictional comparison and provides a baseline for ontology development and future triangulation against citizen perception, expert assessment, and technical evaluation.