Increasing collaboration and participation in smart city governance: a cross-case analysis of smart city initiatives

Abstract

This study addresses the concept of smart governance in the context of smart cities, with a focus on analyzing the phenomenon of smart collaboration. Relying on the existing collaboration and participation concepts in the smart city domain, an empirical analysis was undertaken of how ICT can promote collaborative governance and increase the participation and engagement in government. The multiple case studies focus on three cities in Brazil that run municipal operations centers in an effort to "become smarter": Rio de Janeiro, Porto Alegre, and Belo Horizonte. Interviews with directors, managers, and technicians shed light on the contribution that ICT makes in promoting an environment of collaboration in the government. The findings have revealed that ICT has an important role in supporting information sharing and integration between government agencies and external stakeholders, including citizens, especially in developing countries.

Smart City Governance in Developing Countries: A Systematic Literature Review

“…The characteristics of all the included 56 studies broadly fall into three categories: (i) studies that focus on in-depth analysis of smart city development process or policy process in a particular jurisdiction [28,, (ii) surveys of citizens and experts regarding their views/opinions/preferences on smart cities adoption [3,[67][68][69][70][71][72][73], and (iii) theorising/conceptualising the developmental trends of smart cities in the context of developing countries [74,75]. While most studies focus on the macropolicy implementation of smart cities, some studies dive into explaining the process of adopting a particular smart systems such as the incorporation of digital platform or ICT into public services [33,55,58,70], adoption of intelligent transport systems [61,[76][77][78], and the adoption of IoT in public services [39,67]. Appendix A provides more detailed information about the 56 studies including country/initiative studied, method of the study and the aims/objectives of the study.…”

“…Appendix A provides more detailed information about the 56 studies including country/initiative studied, method of the study and the aims/objectives of the study. Geographical locations (country/continent) of the included studies by descending order (based on the number of studies identified) India [28,[32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44][67][68][69][70]79] China [45][46][47][48][49][50][51][52][53]71,76,80] Indonesia [54][55][56][57] Brazil [3,58,72] Malaysia [59][60][61] Vietnam [62,73] Mexico [63] Turkey [78] Egypt [81] Romania [64] Nepal [65] ...…”

“…Qualitative city-level case studies [32][33][34]37,38,42,44,45,[47][48][49]50,52,53,[56][57][58]60,62,65,76,80] Qualitative country-level case studies [28,33,35,38,43,44,47,48,52,55,57,58,60-62,65,66,[78]] Qualitative continent-level case studies [74,75] Quantitative surveys [3,[67][68][69][70][71][72][73] 1 Contexts and characteristics of the 56 studies included in the review; please see Appendix A for more details.…”

“…1. Improving government efficacy in public service delivery: The foremost purpose of developing a smart city is to improve the government's efficiency in public service provision [38][39][40]50,58,66]. By capitalising on the technological prowess of IoT platforms, it is hoped that smart city development will improve public service efficiency by reducing transaction costs in the delivery of public services [40,74], facilitating a more efficient information structure to connect with citizens more effectively [50,69], improving production efficiency of firms [44], and inferring knowledge and insights generated from data collected from the IoT system to improve forecasting demand, quality monitoring, and anomaly detection of essential public services [39].…”

Unintended Side Effects of the Digital Transition: European Scientists’ Messages from a Proposition-Based Expert Round Table

“…Comment: Information sharing and cooperation, together with participatory practices in policymaking, are key elements in discussions surrounding the use of ICT to enable collaborative governance [103]. There is a need to reconstruct governance and democracy into hybrid forms of organized cooperation that go beyond national government [104].…”