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

Abstract

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.

Points for practitioners

Smart city projects can be used by governing authorities as instruments to achieve a variety of policy goals

Examples of policy goals are to boost local economic development, to improve the effectiveness of municipal service provision, to strengthen social bonds across local community members, to promote the ecological preservation of urban environments and to improve the collaboration between citizens and public administrations

Local governments can adaptively use smart technologies as instruments to overcome multiple place-based environmental, social and economic problems

Local governments should frame smart urban technologies as means to solve different societal problems and achieve different policy goals – rather than an end per se

Keywords

Belgium digital governance interpretive public administration municipal government smart city

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Albino

Berardi

Dangelico

(2015) Smart cities: Definitions, dimensions, performance, and initiatives. Journal of Urban Technology 22(1): 3–21.

Angelidou

(2014) Smart city policies: A spatial approach. Cities 41(Supplment 1): S3–S11.

Barcevičius

Cibaitė

Codagnone

, 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

Rhodes

RAW

(2022) All you need is … a network: The rise of interpretive public administration. Public Administration 100(1): 149–160.

Biesaga

Domaradzka

Roszczyńska-Kurasińska

, 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

(2013) Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning. New York: Springer.

Blei

(2012) Probabilistic topic models. Communications of the ACM 55(4): 77–84.

Bolívar

MPR

Meijer

(2016) Smart governance: Using a literature review and empirical analysis to build a research model. Social Science Computer Review 34(6): 673–692.

Boltanski

Thévenot

(1991) De la justification. Les economies de la grandeur. Paris: Gallimard.

10.

Bovaird

(2003) E-government and e-governance: Organisational implications, options and dilemmas. Public Policy and Administration 18(2): 37–56.

11.

Castelnovo

Sorrentino

(2018) The digital government imperative: A context-aware perspective. Public Management Review 20(5): 709–725.

12.

Chen

(2022) The impact of smart city pilots on corporate total factor productivity. Environmental Science and Pollution Research 29: 83155–83168.

13.

Pagliarello M

Cino

(2022) Unpacking ambiguity in ideational change: The polysemy of the ‘Europe of Knowledge’. West European Politics 45(4): 884–905.

14.

Crivello

(2015) Urban policy mobilities: The case of Turin as a smart city. European Planning Studies 23(5): 909–921.

15.

Desdemoustier

Crutzen

Giffinger

(2019) Municipalities’ understanding of the Smart City concept: An exploratory analysis in Belgium. Technological Forecasting and Social Change 142: 129–141.

16.

Engelbert

Van Zoonen

Hirzalla

(2019) Excluding citizens from the European smart city: The discourse practices of pursuing and granting smartness. Technological Forecasting and Social Change 142: 347–353.

17.

Esposito

Clement

Mora

, 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.

18.

Esposito

Terlizzi

Crutzen

(2022) Policy narratives and megaprojects: The case of the Lyon–Turin high-speed railway. Public Management Review 24(1): 55–79.

19.

European

Commission

(2018) Digital Economy and Society Index (DESI), 2018 Country Report Belgium. Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union.

20.

Giffinger

Fertner

Kramar

, 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).

21.

Gil-Garcia

Dawes

Pardo

(2018) Digital government and public management research: Finding the crossroads. Public Management Review 20(5): 633–646.

22.

Greco

Bencardino

(2014) The paradigm of the modern city: SMART and SENSEable cities for smart, inclusive and sustainable growth. In: Murgante

Misra

Rocha

AMAC

, et al. (eds) Computational Science and Its Applications – ICCSA 2014. Cham: Springer, 579–597.

23.

Grossi

Pianezzi

(2017) Smart cities: Utopia or neoliberal ideology? Cities 69: 79–85.

24.

Guenduez

Mettler

(2023) Strategically constructed narratives on artificial intelligence: What stories are told in governmental artificial intelligence policies? Government Information Quarterly 40(1): 101719.

25.

Hollands

(2008) Will the real smart city please stand up? Intelligent, progressive or entrepreneurial? City 12(3): 303–320.

26.

Hollands

(2015) Critical interventions into the corporate smart city. Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society 8(1): 61–77.

27.

Kitchin

(2015) Making sense of smart cities: Addressing present shortcomings. Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society 8(1): 131–136.

28.

De Jong

(2019) Evolution in city branding practices in China’s Pearl River Delta since the year 2000. Cities 89: 154–166.

29.

Luque-Ayala

Marvin

(2015) Developing a critical understanding of smart urbanism? Urban Studies 52(12): 2105–2116.

30.

Mazzucato

(2017) Mission-oriented innovation policy: Challanges and opportunities. Working Paper IIPP WP 2017–10. London: University College London, Institution for Innovation and Public Purpose.

31.

Mazzucato

Ryan-Collins

(2022) Putting value creation back into ‘public value’: from market-fixing to market-shaping. Journal of Economic Policy Reform 25(4): 345–360.

32.

Meijer

(2015) E-governance innovation: Barriers and strategies. Government Information Quarterly 32(2): 198–206.

33.

Meijer

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.

34.

Meijer

Bolivar

MPR

Gil-Garcia

(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.

35.

Mora

Deakin

Reid

(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.

36.

Mora

Deakin

Reid

(2019b) Strategic principles for smart city development: A multiple case study analysis of European best practices. Technological Forecasting and Social Change 142: 70–97.

37.

Nam

Pardo

(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.

38.

Patriotta

Gond

Schultz

(2011) Maintaining Legitimacy: Controversies, Orders of Worth, and Public Justifications. Journal of Management Studies 48(8): 1804–1836.

39.

Rijshouwer

Leclercq

van Zoonen

(2022) Public views of the smart city: Towards the construction of a social problem. Big Data & Society 9(1): 1–12.

40.

Shelton

Zook

Wiig

(2015) The ‘actually existing smart city’. Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society 8(1): 13–25.

41.

Sievert

Shirley

(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.

42.

Söderström

Paasche

Klauser

(2014) Smart cities as corporate storytelling. City 18(3): 307–320.

43.

Tang

Jayakar

Feng

, et al. (2019) Identifying smart city archetypes from the bottom up: A content analysis of municipal plans. Telecommunications Policy 43(10): 101834.

44.

Terlizzi

(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.

45.

Torfing

(2016) Collaborative Innovation in the Public Sector. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.

46.

Townsend

(2013) Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia. New York: WW Norton.

47.

United Nations (2022) E-government survey 2022: The future of digital government. New York: United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs.

48.

United Nations. General Assembly (2015) Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. A/RES/70/1. United Nations.

49.

Vanmarsenille

Desdemoustier

(2018) Baromètre 2018 – Stratégie et projets smart city en Belgique . Research report. Liège: Smart City Institute.

50.

Viitanen

Kingston

(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.

51.

Visser

(2019) Posthuman policies for creative, smart, eco-cities? Case studies from China. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 51(1): 206–225.

52.

Washburn

Sindhu

(2010) Helping CIOs understand ‘Smart City’ initiatives: Defining the smart city, its drivers, and the role of the CIO. Trends report. Forrester Research.

Supplementary Material

Please find the following supplemental material available below.

For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.

For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.

0.00 MB

0.28 MB