Interpreting digital governance at the municipal level: Evidence from smart city projects in Belgium

Esposito, Giovanni; Terlizzi, Andrea; Guarino, Massimo; Crutzen, Nathalie

doi:10.1177/00208523231167538

Download

Article (Scientific journals)

Interpreting digital governance at the municipal level: Evidence from smart city projects in Belgium

Esposito, Giovanni; Terlizzi, Andrea; Guarino, Massimo et al.

2023 • In International Review of Administrative Sciences

Peer Reviewed verified by ORBi

Permalink
https://hdl.handle.net/2268/303762

DOI
10.1177/00208523231167538

Files (1)Send to Details Statistics Bibliography Similar publications

Files

Full Text

Pre_print_Orbi.pdf

Author preprint (647.43 kB)

Download

All documents in ORBi are protected by a user license.

Send to

RIS BibTex APA Chicago Permalink X Linkedin

Details

Keywords :

smart city; digital governance; justification theory

Abstract :

[en] This article adopts an interpretive approach to investigate how local policy-makers portray and justify their own visions of digital governance initiatives at the municipal level. Our investigation focuses on smart city projects submitted by various Belgian municipalities in the framework of the ‘Intelligent Territory’ call for proposals initiated in 2019 by the Walloon Region. We use Boltanski and Thévenot’s theory of orders of worth and combine quantitative and qualitative content analysis to categorize the different justifications elaborated by municipal governments. The empirical results point to the polysemic nature of the smart city concept and highlight the diversity of opportunities offered by smart city policies according to municipal policy-makers. Overall, our study contributes to the understanding of the varieties of interpretations underpinning the construction of digital governance initiatives. It therefore supports the argument according to which there is no one-size-fits-all approach to smart city policies as local policy-makers may attribute different meanings to them and may formulate place-based ICTs solutions to what they perceive as the most pressing problems of their territories.

Disciplines :

Sociology & social sciences
Political science, public administration & international relations

Author, co-author :

Esposito, Giovanni ; Université de Liège - ULiège > HEC Liège Research > HEC Liège Research: Strategy & Performance for the Society

Terlizzi, Andrea; UniFI - Università degli Studi di Firenze [IT] > Political Sciences

Guarino, Massimo; Italian Ministry of Culture

Crutzen, Nathalie ; Université de Liège - ULiège > HEC Liège Research > HEC Liège Research: Strategy & Performance for the Society

Language :

English

Title :

Interpreting digital governance at the municipal level: Evidence from smart city projects in Belgium

Publication date :

May 2023

Journal title :

International Review of Administrative Sciences

ISSN :

0020-8523

eISSN :

1461-7226

Publisher :

SAGE, Thousand Oaks, United States - California

Peer reviewed :

Peer Reviewed verified by ORBi

Available on ORBi :

since 09 June 2023

Statistics

Number of views

59 (4 by ULiège)

Number of downloads

130 (2 by ULiège)

More statistics

Scopus citations^®

Scopus citations^®
without self-citations

OpenCitations

Bibliography

Albino V Berardi U Dangelico RM (2015) Smart cities: Definitions, dimensions, performance, and initiatives. Journal of Urban Technology 22(1): 3–21.
Angelidou M (2014) Smart city policies: A spatial approach. Cities 41(Supplment 1): S3–S11.
Barcevičius E Cibaitė G Codagnone C, et al. (2019) Exploring digital government transformation in the EU: Analysis of the state of the art and review of literature. EUR 29987 EN. Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union.
Bevir M Rhodes RAW (2022) All you need is … a network: The rise of interpretive public administration. Public Administration 100(1): 149–160.
Biesaga M Domaradzka A Roszczyńska-Kurasińska M, et al. (2023) The effect of the pandemic on European narratives on smart cities and surveillance. Urban Studies: 1–21. DOI: 10.1177/00420980221138317.
Bishop CM (2013) Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning. New York: Springer.
Blei DM (2012) Probabilistic topic models. Communications of the ACM 55(4): 77–84.
Bolívar MPR Meijer AJ (2016) Smart governance: Using a literature review and empirical analysis to build a research model. Social Science Computer Review 34(6): 673–692.
Boltanski L Thévenot L (1991) De la justification. Les economies de la grandeur. Paris: Gallimard.
Bovaird T (2003) E-government and e-governance: Organisational implications, options and dilemmas. Public Policy and Administration 18(2): 37–56.
Castelnovo W Sorrentino M (2018) The digital government imperative: A context-aware perspective. Public Management Review 20(5): 709–725.
Chen P (2022) The impact of smart city pilots on corporate total factor productivity. Environmental Science and Pollution Research 29: 83155–83168.
Pagliarello M Cino (2022) Unpacking ambiguity in ideational change: The polysemy of the ‘Europe of Knowledge’. West European Politics 45(4): 884–905.
Crivello S (2015) Urban policy mobilities: The case of Turin as a smart city. European Planning Studies 23(5): 909–921.
Desdemoustier J Crutzen N Giffinger R (2019) Municipalities’ understanding of the Smart City concept: An exploratory analysis in Belgium. Technological Forecasting and Social Change 142: 129–141.
Engelbert J Van Zoonen L Hirzalla F (2019) Excluding citizens from the European smart city: The discourse practices of pursuing and granting smartness. Technological Forecasting and Social Change 142: 347–353.
Esposito G Clement J Mora L, et al. (2021) One size does not fit all: Framing smart city policy narratives within regional socio-economic contexts in Brussels and Wallonia. Cities 118: 1–14.
Esposito G Terlizzi A Crutzen N (2022) Policy narratives and megaprojects: The case of the Lyon–Turin high-speed railway. Public Management Review 24(1): 55–79.
European Commission (2018) Digital Economy and Society Index (DESI), 2018 Country Report Belgium. Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union.
Giffinger R Fertner C Kramar H, et al. (2007) City-ranking of European medium-sized cities. In: Konferenzhomepage: www.ifhp2007copenhagen.dk, Copenhagen, Denmark, 23–26 September 2007. Available at: http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12708/103386 (accessed 31 August 2021).
Gil-Garcia JR Dawes SS Pardo TA (2018) Digital government and public management research: Finding the crossroads. Public Management Review 20(5): 633–646.
Greco I Bencardino M (2014) The paradigm of the modern city: SMART and SENSEable cities for smart, inclusive and sustainable growth. In: Murgante B Misra S Rocha AMAC, et al. (eds) Computational Science and Its Applications – ICCSA 2014. Cham: Springer, 579–597.
Grossi G Pianezzi D (2017) Smart cities: Utopia or neoliberal ideology? Cities 69: 79–85.
Guenduez AA Mettler T (2023) Strategically constructed narratives on artificial intelligence: What stories are told in governmental artificial intelligence policies? Government Information Quarterly 40(1): 101719.
Hollands RG (2008) Will the real smart city please stand up? Intelligent, progressive or entrepreneurial? City 12(3): 303–320.
Hollands RG (2015) Critical interventions into the corporate smart city. Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society 8(1): 61–77.
Kitchin R (2015) Making sense of smart cities: Addressing present shortcomings. Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society 8(1): 131–136.
Lu H De Jong M (2019) Evolution in city branding practices in China’s Pearl River Delta since the year 2000. Cities 89: 154–166.
Luque-Ayala A Marvin S (2015) Developing a critical understanding of smart urbanism? Urban Studies 52(12): 2105–2116.
Mazzucato M (2017) Mission-oriented innovation policy: Challanges and opportunities. Working Paper IIPP WP 2017–10. London: University College London, Institution for Innovation and Public Purpose.
Mazzucato M Ryan-Collins J (2022) Putting value creation back into ‘public value’: from market-fixing to market-shaping. Journal of Economic Policy Reform 25(4): 345–360.
Meijer A (2015) E-governance innovation: Barriers and strategies. Government Information Quarterly 32(2): 198–206.
Meijer A Bolívar MPR (2016) Governing the smart city: A review of the literature on smart urban governance. International Review of Administrative Sciences 82(2): 392–408.
Meijer A Bolivar MPR Gil-Garcia JR (2018) From e-government to digital era governance and beyond: Lessons from 15 years of research into information and communications technology in the public sector. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory: 1–6.
Mora L Deakin M Reid A (2019a) Combining co-citation clustering and text-based analysis to reveal the main development paths of smart cities. Technological Forecasting and Social Change 142: 56–69.
Mora L Deakin M Reid A (2019b) Strategic principles for smart city development: A multiple case study analysis of European best practices. Technological Forecasting and Social Change 142: 70–97.
Nam T Pardo TA (2011) Smart city as urban innovation: Focusing on management, policy, and context. In: ICEGOVE ‘11: Proceedings of the 5th international conference on theory and practice of electronic governance, Tallinn, Estonia, 26–29 September 2011, p. 185. New York: Association for Computing Machinery Press.
Patriotta G Gond J Schultz F (2011) Maintaining Legitimacy: Controversies, Orders of Worth, and Public Justifications. Journal of Management Studies 48(8): 1804–1836.
Rijshouwer EA Leclercq EM van Zoonen L (2022) Public views of the smart city: Towards the construction of a social problem. Big Data & Society 9(1): 1–12.
Shelton T Zook M Wiig A (2015) The ‘actually existing smart city’. Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society 8(1): 13–25.
Sievert C Shirley K (2014) LDAvis: A method for visualizing and interpreting topics. In: Proceedings of the workshop on interactive language learning, visualization, and interfaces, Baltimore, MD, USA, 27 June 2014. Stroudsburg: Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 63–70. DOI: 10.3115/v1/W14-3110.
Söderström O Paasche T Klauser F (2014) Smart cities as corporate storytelling. City 18(3): 307–320.
Tang Z Jayakar K Feng X, et al. (2019) Identifying smart city archetypes from the bottom up: A content analysis of municipal plans. Telecommunications Policy 43(10): 101834.
Terlizzi A (2021) The digitalization of the public sector: A systematic literature review. Rivista Italiana di Politiche Pubbliche / Italian Journal of Public Policy 16(1): 5–38.
Torfing J (2016) Collaborative Innovation in the Public Sector. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.
Townsend AM (2013) Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia. New York: WW Norton.
United Nations (2022) E-government survey 2022: The future of digital government. New York: United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs.
United Nations. General Assembly (2015) Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. A/RES/70/1. United Nations.
Vanmarsenille DB Desdemoustier J (2018) Baromètre 2018 – Stratégie et projets smart city en Belgique. Research report. Liège: Smart City Institute.
Viitanen J Kingston R (2014) Smart cities and green growth: Outsourcing democratic and environmental resilience to the global technology sector. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 46(4): 803–819.
Visser R (2019) Posthuman policies for creative, smart, eco-cities? Case studies from China. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 51(1): 206–225.
Washburn D Sindhu U (2010) Helping CIOs understand ‘Smart City’ initiatives: Defining the smart city, its drivers, and the role of the CIO. Trends report. Forrester Research.