Search

Smart city projects rely upon dynamic and complex multi-stakeholder collaboration. This collaboration can be challenging. In this study, we use an instrumental lens and argue that tools can help public professionals in dealing with smart governance challenges. Building upon smart governance and collaborative governance models, we conceptualize smart governance as a toolbox. Based on our “smart governance toolbox”, we assess the variety of tools available for professionals to initiate and support multi-stakeholder collaboration by reviewing academic and grey literature. This review results in the identification of a broad range of tools that research and practice have developed. However, we also demonstrate that certain parts of the ‘smart governance toolbox’ remain almost empty: there are few tools for assessing the smart collaborative governance context, facilitating the collaborative structure, tackling technology issues, and measuring outcomes of smart city practices. Future design research should focus on developing instruments needed to make the smart governance toolbox complete.

Recently, we have seen a rising interest in the study of complex systems in public administration. This paper demonstrates how specific design interventions, also referred to as ‘probes’, can be used to investigate complex systems. The value of this strategy is demonstrated by probing three open data ecosystems in the Netherlands. The probes produce a new understanding of the interrelations between underlying patterns and dynamics of open government data practices. Our research shows that probing is a promising research strategy that can produce rigorous academic knowledge on the underlying patterns and dynamics of complex systems in public administration.

Cities around the world have started pilots to experiment with Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) to tackle urban problems, optimize city services and enhance the quality of life for citizens. At the moment, many smart city pilots have difficulty scaling up beyond the pilot stage. Effective collaboration between quadruple-helix partners in the smart city is both crucial and challenging for promoting the development, implementation, and scaling-up of smart city pilots. However, professionals in the smart city field lack easy-to-use tools to resolve smart collaborative governance challenges. To bridge this gap, this paper will use a Design Science Research (DSR) methodology to develop generic high-level guidelines for smart collaborative governance tools in the smart city context. These generic high-level guidelines also include guidelines that help to resolve dilemmas in the design of collaboration tools regarding their desired outcomes, complexity, and scope.

During recent years, the amount of data released on platforms by public administrations around the world have exploded. Open government data platforms are aimed at enhancing transparency and participation. Even though the promises of these platforms are high, their full potential has not yet been reached. Scholars have identified technical and quality barriers of open data usage. Although useful, these issues fail to acknowledge that the meaning of open data also depends on the context and people involved. In this study we analyze open data usage from a practice lens – as a social construction that emerges over time in interaction with governments and users in a specific context – to enhance our understanding of the role of context and agency in the development of open data platforms. This study is based on innovative action-based research in which civil servants’ and citizens’ initiatives collaborate to find solutions for public problems using an open data platform. It provides an insider perspective of Open Data Work. The findings show that an absence of a shared cognitive framework for understanding open data and a lack of high-quality datasets can prevent processes of collaborative learning. Our contextual approach stresses the need for open data practices that work on the basis of rich interactions with users rather than government-centric implementations.

After the Second World War, the desire to equalize society became a deep drive of contemporary European culture, leading to social protection services. However that does not mean that inequalities are obsolete in European countries. One of the inequities that still persist today is inequality in healthcare. This chapter examines how inequity in access to healthcare became a nervous area in the Netherlands. We show how the recent reform in the Dutch healthcare system affected the use of healthcare services among socially disadvantaged groups in the Netherlands. In addition, we analyze how a local government attempts to reverse healthcare inequities. We show that nervousness might not only arise from an enduring history of inequality but may also arise from more recent societal developments leading to inequity, which are at odds with historical deeply engrained societal values of solidarity and justice. We also show that more data collection is needed to be able to observe possible hidden inequity.

New technologies such as Big Data Analytics and the Internet of Things hold the promise of providing new insights that can potentially improve decision-making of local governments. However, in practice there seem to be few examples of this actually happening. Academic literature suggests an impediment to its widespread adoption revolves around a lack of existence of appropriate human competencies in local governments. However, what these competencies exactly are has not been identified so far. This study fills this gap by identifying the competencies that are required in the process of data-driven decision-making (DDDM) in local governments. It does so by first developing a preliminary theoretical model, which is used as the basis for studying how DDDM processes take place in practice in a ‘typical’ local government in the Netherlands. A combination of twelve expert interviews and twenty-two Behavioral Event Interviews (BEIs) provide the empirical data of this study. Based on the analysis of this, this study finds that the DDDM process as observed in the case is hybrid. It is a combination of the rationalities of ‘traditional’ decision-making and of ‘pure’ data-driven decision-making. Building on this finding, the competencies identified as required in this process are also hybrid. They are a combination of traditional and new competencies that should be connected in different phases in the process of DDDM by local governments. This will help them exploit the possibilities data offers in a responsible way. This is important in today’s society in which the influence of new technologies will only increase.

Een onderzoek naar de democratische legitimiteit van Open Overheid initiatieven op lokaal niveau. Deze initiatieven worden gekenmerkt door de aspecten: transparantie, participatie en samenwerking. Onderzocht wordt hoe Open Overheid initiatieven een bijdrage leveren aan de input, throughput en output legitimiteit en wat dit betekent voor de democratische legitimiteit in het algemeen.