Beyond Technical Debt: Governance Debt in Low-Code and Citizen Development Portfolios

People are increasingly promoting low-code platforms and citizen development as pragmatic solutions to digital delivery pressures, as they enable faster, localised development outside traditional software teams. However, code-centric risk framing, which emphasises maintainability, integration quality, and technical debt, dominates both practice and research. This paper advances an alternative account by theorising that governance debt is a cumulative sociotechnical liability that arises when the capability to build is widely distributed, but the accountability infrastructure required to safeguard artefacts does not scale. Governance debt manifests through compounding patterns such as ownership ambiguity, permission sprawl, opaque data lineage, undocumented dependencies, weak auditability and neglected lifecycle stewardship. These patterns are portfolio-level in their emergence and consequences because liabilities are produced by the aggregate of many small artefacts and their shared controls, not by any single application alone. The paper develops a mechanism model explaining how governance debt accumulates over time and why repayment costs increase as low-code portfolios grow. It then derives design principles and portfolio governance patterns that interrupt accumulation mechanisms while preserving local innovation, positioning governance as a first-class design concern in contemporary IS development systems. The argument contributes to debates on the future of IS design and development by shifting attention from code-level debt to the design of organisational infrastructures that make decentralised development governable at scale.