Enhancing Sustainability Transparency in Local Governments—An Empirical Research in Europe

Abstract

In the current socioeconomic context, the question of local government sustainability transparency is of great interest to policymakers, managers, citizens and other stakeholders, and yet one to which previous research has devoted little specific attention. At the same time, the Internet has become an instrument of good governance worldwide and government entities in Europe have strived to promote e-government to improve transparency towards citizens. The aim of this study was to identify factors that can help politicians and managers improve practices of sustainability information disclosed by European local governments. To do so, an empirical study was conducted of 91 municipalities in nine countries, comparing three main administrative cultures. Our analysis of the study results highlights various demographic, socioeconomic, financial and legal factors that may be useful to policymakers and managers in promoting the online provision of sustainability information in Anglo-Saxon, Nordic and Southern European countries.

Promoting Online Transparency to Help Achieve the Sustainable Development Goals: An Empirical Study of Local Governments in Latin America

“…These levels are somewhat higher than those obtained previously for LGs in Europe, where the average level barely reached 50% [36,76], except for environmental information, in which case the amount of information disclosed was twice that observed for the Latin American LGs in our sample. In comparison with the findings reported by Frias et al [53], who considered LGs in Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Spain and Portugal, our results reflect a somewhat higher level of disclosure, especially that of economic information, although similarly low levels of disclosure of environmental information were observed in both cases.…”

“…Another advantage of our focus on large municipalities is that it provides sufficient homogeneity with which to compare our results with those of previous research in this field, in European countries [2,4,36,49,50]. Finally, and as observed above, this study considers the case of LGs in Latin America because previous research has highlighted the need to study the question of transparency on sustainability in this geographic area in particular; and, furthermore, because of the documented interest in better understanding the impact of administrative culture on the disclosure of economic, social and environmental information [7,25,30,31,76].…”

“…Regarding the first of these, levels of information disclosure on population size tend to be higher in larger municipalities [67,97]. In published information on sustainability (both on financial sustainability and on social and environmental sustainability), the influence of population density is commonly cited, and a significant positive relationship between these two factors has been reported in several papers [25,28,36,76].…”

Citizens’ Involvement in E-Government in the European Union: The Rising Importance of the Digital Skills

“…In this regard, the new model becomes a reference model rather than a concrete finite state model. Finally, despite that the word sustainability has been loosely used to define the efficiency that a government could achieve in e-government services [35], there is a growing interest in linking the effectiveness of e-government with environmental sustainability [36], and fertile research can be found for local governments [37,38]. Estevez and Janowski [39] also emphasised the role of electronic governance for sustainable development, proposing a conceptual framework.…”

Exploring Relationships between Environmental Performance, E-Government and Corruption: A Multivariate Perspective

“…E-governments allow citizens to take part in democratic institutions and political processes [7,9], producing an image of accessible, transparent, responsible, effective and participatory governance [10]. However, the lack of transparency of online information by institutions exerts a negative influence regarding sustainability [11]. E-participation contributes to the increase and progress of communications between the citizens themselves and the ruling politicians [12] and therefore, in democratic processes [13].…”