Smart City Governance: A Local Emergent Perspective

Abstract

This chapter presents a local emergent perspective on smart city governance. Smart city governance is about using new technologies to develop innovative governance arrangements. Cities all around the world are struggling to find smart solutions to wicked problems and they hope to learn from successful technogovernance practices in other cities. Learning about successes of smart city governance is important but lessons need to be contextualized: approaches that work in one city may fail in another one. This chapter presents the local cooperative knowledge potential and the nature of the problem domain as key contextual factors and develops a model for studying and assessing smart city governance in context.

Smart Governance For Sustainable Cities: Findings from a Systematic Literature Review

“…A first observation is that the effects of smart governance on sustainable urban development have remained strongly understudied. This is confirmed by the strand of the investigated corpus arguing that the way smart governance contributes to a more sustainable society is largely unknown (Paskaleva, 2014;Voorberg et al, 2015;Osella et al , 2015;Aichholzer et al, 2016;Meijer, 2016). Although both academics and practitioners commonly associate the potential of smart governance with creating greener, healthier, more equitable, economically and culturally thriving communities (Portney, 2013;Meijer and Bolívar, 2016;Bifulco et al, 2016), verification of this was difficult to find in the examined literature.…”

“…Although trust can be an individual characteristic, the literature reveals that the general condition of trust within society is a vital factor in digital cooperation between public and civil actors (Ertiö, 2015;Molinari, 2010;Lee and Kim, 2014;Capra, 2016;Abu-Shanab and Al-Quraan, 2015;Certomà et al, 2015;Wehn et al, 2015;Meijer, 2016). Trust relates to the image people have of their government regarding existing policies, what they can expect from governments, and their own perceived influence in technology-facilitated decision-making.…”

“…The literature also contained references to informal institutional dimensions that might shape the evolution of e-government, as well as the propensity for electronic co-production between civil and governmental stakeholders and the forms this could take (Al Hujran et al, 2013;Meijer, 2016;Janowski, 2015;Correljé et al, 2015;Tikka and Sassi, 2011;Álvarez-Crespo, 2014;de Araujo and Taher, 2014). These factors cover issues of customs, traditions, religion, and routines within a given society or community, although their effects are not clear.…”

“…It is a cumulative technological effect-a process in which attitudes are gradually being adjusted to the available means (Åström and Granberg, 2008). As the level of Internet infiltration increases, municipalities are feeling an even greater push from citizens and from societal and business organizations to provide (environmental) information, implement sustainability measures, and to include multiple stakeholders in policy processes and online services (Azad et al, 2010;Cleland et al, 2012;Al Hujran et al, 2013;Gabrys, 2014;Yigitcanlar and Lee, 2014;Paskaleva, 2014;Meijer, 2016;Twinomurinzi et al, 2012;Álvarez-Crespo, 2014).…”

“…Contextual aspects include external placeor domain-specific circumstances, such as physical, political, institutional, societal, economic, and cultural conditions, as potential influences in digitalized governance processes. Although widely recognized, a systematic overview of the influence of contextual factors on smart governance processes is still lacking (Walters, 2011;Meijer, 2016;Gupta et al, 2015;Sampson, 2017;Hong, 2015;Zheng, 2015). This study fills this gap by opening the black box of the context-reliant nature of smart governance.…”