Multiscalar Smart City Governance in India

Analysing multilevel governance dynamics in India: exercising hierarchy through the Smart Cities Mission

“…Moreover, characteristics of Type I organizations were understood by national stakeholders as counterproductive to implementation of the SCM, in particular the competing priorities of the ULBs and their organizational culture, which are perceived as fostering a lethargic and ineffective decision-making process. While other research has identified the SPV as a legitimate design response to lack of local capacity to deliver on complex smart city initiatives (Prasad et al, 2021), our research highlights how this design choice is more ideologically deep seated and potentially problematic.…”

“…In doing so, it finds that the utilization of Type II (task-specific) forms of governance within India's SCM, is not driven by functionalist logics of the policy problem (as typically assumed in the MLG literature), but rather by the GoI's desire to overcome perceived failings of the constituted government apparatus. Where previous studies of SCM have identified its design as logical given local capacity issues (Prasad et al, 2021), here it is identified as more ideologically driven and potentially problematic. The use of Type II MLG as a strategic tool of control by nation states is, we conclude, an overlooked yet important aspect of the MLG story and one which is brought to the fore in this case.…”

State-steered smartmentality in Chinese smart urbanism

“…The municipal government, in particular, enacts a follow-up agenda in consolidating the national regime. This reflects an important aspect of Chinafied smartmentality, which is different from the Indian smart urbanism where the national, state and municipal governments focus on management, deployment and implementation, respectively (Ahluwalia, 2019; Prasad et al, 2021). The lack of political devolution in decision-making handicaps the flexibility of pragmatic and substantial decision-making on the city’s STS efforts and often results in the overlooking of local contingencies and uncertainties, hence leading to low applicability and a low uptake rate of existing STS applications in the city.…”

Pandemic management, citizens and the Indian Smart cities: Reflections from the right to the smart city and the digital divide

“…5), culminating in the ignorance of most citizens' demands and suggestions. Prasad et al (2021) also infer from their assessment of the multi-scalar governance model of smart cities Bhubaneswar, Pune, and Chennai that the SPVs function in a non-democratic way, which highlights poor collaborative governance and subsequent depletion of the representational powers of the local governments.…”