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
Introduction
Over the past several decades, the development of information and communication technologies (ICTs) has deeply affected how individuals and organizations think of and behave in government and society. Within this context, public policy and administration scholars have devoted growing attention to the digital transformation, defined as ‘the process of implementing ICT-enabled government innovations’ (Barcevičius et al., 2019: 10). While early debates narrowly focused on ‘digital government’ – that is, ‘the electronic enablement of all the services provided or commissioned by the public sector’ (Bovaird, 2003: 37) – more recent developments mobilize the notion of ‘digital governance’ to address both service delivery and the complex network of public administration, private sector, civil society and citizens that allow for the service delivery (Gil-Garcia et al., 2018). Drawing on these recent developments, in this article, we define digital governance as the use of ICTs ‘to help government to strengthen interactions with citizens and societal actors to solve societal problems collectively’ (Meijer, 2015: 199).
The main arguments in favour of the digitalization of governance processes mainly point to improvements in efficiency, quality, effectiveness, accountability and trust either on the demand side (e.g. digital divide) or on the supply side (e.g. ICT infrastructure, civil servants’ ICT expertise) of public sector organizations (Meijer et al., 2018). However, research has underlined relevant heterogeneities across countries, highlighting how a wide range of (pre-)existing institutional, organizational and cultural factors drive the speed and breadth of the diffusion of digital technologies in the public sector. Therefore, scholars have increasingly adopted a sociotechnical perspective to study digital transformations, conceiving of digital governance beyond its purely technical innovative aspects (Castelnovo and Sorrentino, 2018). It seems that what the technical study of ICT-related innovation policy is overlooking today is the understanding of innovation as a discourse through which policy-makers construct a particular (innovative) social reality in governmental organizations (Terlizzi, 2021). By focusing on the local level of government, this article addresses this gap and advances our understanding of the discourses through which policy-makers justify and construct digital policy realities. In particular, we focus on the smart city, namely an ICT-enabled policy innovation made in urban settings (Nam and Pardo, 2011).
Digital governance is a key defining element of the smart city concept, which has become extremely popular over the last 10 years (Bolívar and Meijer, 2016). As the United Nations (2022: 183) point out, ‘smart cities represent one of the most innovative manifestations of digital transformation at the local level’. Indeed, the smart city has become a major leitmotif in local discourses of urban development (Crivello, 2015). Local governments increasingly use smart city programmes as policy instruments to overcome a wide variety of place-based (environmental, social and economic) problems, reflecting what they perceive as the most pressing socio-economic needs of their territories and populaces (Esposito et al., 2021). However, although the all-encompassing nature of the concept appeals to policy-makers (Visser, 2019), they may have difficulties in making sense of the opportunities that smart cities can offer to local communities. Policy-makers, practitioners and academics alike can in fact perceive this concept as nebulous and ambiguous. From one municipality to another, different interpretations of the smart city can coexist: each locality has its own constraints and develops its own understanding based on historical heritage and local context (Desdemoustier et al., 2019).
Therefore, it is important that local governments fully understand the potential of smart city policies, otherwise they risk being influenced by the corporate sector and frame urban problems in a way that favours business-led technological solutions rather than government-led and long-term urban planning (Grossi and Pianezzi, 2017). It is indeed well known that the smart city movement started in 2008 under the impulse of the International Business Machines (IBM) corporation within the framework of the Smarter Planet strategy (Chen, 2022) – a strategy aimed at exploiting IBM’s ICTs solutions outside the private sector and promoting their use in municipal administrations. The Smarter Planet was supported by a powerful marketing campaign presenting ICT solutions as the pharmakon of contemporary urban pathologies (e.g. traffic jams, climate change, demographic increase) (Söderström et al., 2014). IBM had in fact realized the importance of exploiting urban technologies and it had identified city administrations as a huge untapped market (Townsend, 2013). To conquer the largest share of this market, IBM provided 100 municipalities over the world with consultancy in the hope that this initial investment would yield returns. This corporate-led approach to smart city development has attracted many criticisms. Most of the latter focus on the fact that this approach influences the way through which city administrations frame urban problems with a view to favouring the interests of business elites and technological providers. This has ultimately strengthened the neoliberal economic agenda, promoted by the storytelling activity of private companies which want to secure their market positions (Biesaga et al., 2023; Grossi and Pianezzi, 2017).
Notwithstanding this corporate visioning, governments do have a central role in promoting innovation (Mazzucato and Ryan-Collins, 2022), including the design and implementation of smart city development strategies (Mora et al., 2019b). Indeed, governmental organizations provide long-term visions for innovation by crafting discourses and narratives around creating public value (Mazzucato, 2017), the latter being understood as ‘a way of measuring progress towards the achievement of broad and widely accepted societal goals’ (Mazzucato and Ryan-Collins, 2022: 346). In this respect, recent scholarship has called for efforts to shed light on the policy discourses developed by local governments vis-à-vis their ambitions of territorial and societal development (Esposito et al., 2021). Against this background, this article unpacks the meaning of digital governance initiatives at the municipal level of government in the context of smart city development. It specifically sheds light on the discourses advanced by local governmental actors to justify the development of smart city projects. In particular, we ask: how do policy-makers justify smart city development at the municipal level?
To answer this question, we use Boltanski and Thévenot’s (1991) theory of orders of worth to categorize the different justifications elaborated by municipal governments about smart city policies in their local context. In doing so, we place the analytical focus on the agency of municipal governments and, specifically, on the discourses that these governments purposefully develop to make sense of and justify smart city programmes within their municipal jurisdictions. We therefore shed light on the variety of beliefs, arguments and justifications that local governments mobilize when developing smart city policies. Empirical evidence is drawn from the ‘Intelligent Territory’ call for projects supported by the Walloon Region, Belgium. Initiated in 2019, this call represented a funding opportunity for municipalities wishing to solve municipal problems through the implementation of smart city projects. The projects submitted by municipal policy-makers address a variety of issues and aim to achieve different policy objectives. Our findings classify the opportunities offered by smart city policies based on the arguments and justifications provided by policy-makers prior to implementation.
The article is structured as follows. The first section defines the object of the analysis and presents the analytical framework based on justification theory. The second section outlines data and methods, and the third section presents the findings. The final section provides discussion and conclusion.
Interpreting digital governance and the smart city through the lenses of justification theory
The digitalization of the public space has recently had a significant impact on how cities are being perceived and governed (Rijshouwer et al., 2022). Indeed, over the last years, smart city innovations, and corresponding digitally enhanced and data-driven governance practices, have been suggested to address urban problems (Luque-Ayala and Marvin, 2015). As a result, the idea of the smart city has been increasingly dominating urban governance scripts around the world (Visser, 2019). It has been introduced as a new paradigm to think of and organize the digital governance and sustainable development of urban areas (Viitanen and Kingston, 2014) and, in particular, to exploit ICTs for developing competitive and sustainable cities (Greco and Bencardino, 2014). The United Nations (2015) defines the smart city as a city using ICTs to achieve: (a) resource efficient, safe, inclusive and accessible urban environments; (b) economic growth based on the principles of environmental sustainability and inclusive prosperity; and (c) equal access for all to public goods and high-quality services. As such, as emphasized by Bolívar and Meijer (2016), the notion of the smart city is intertwined with that of digital governance, referring here to the use of ICTs by city governments to improve the efficiency and the effectiveness of their action within different policy fields – environment, mobility, economy, urban governance, citizens’ empowerment and social welfare (Giffinger et al., 2007; Gil-Garcia et al., 2018).
Achieving such advantages through smart city innovations is a complex transformational process that involves multiple and interconnected changes at the level of ‘hard’ (e.g. buildings, energy grids) and ‘soft’ (e.g. human and social capital, urban culture) components of urban systems (Angelidou, 2014). These changes can be grouped into three main categories: technology, human resources and governance (Meijer and Bolívar, 2016). Whereas the technological dimension places the focus on the introduction of ICT solutions in urban systems as the key factor for smart city development (Washburn and Sindhu, 2010), the other two dimensions focus on non-technological components and emphasize that digital city governments are not a mere technological matter (Albino et al., 2015). In this respect, the adoption of a context-aware perspective is crucial for fully grasping the broader meaning of this phenomenon (Castelnovo and Sorrentino, 2018). In fact, cities require human capital to enable smart city-related transition processes (Hollands, 2008), but also collaborative environments for technology to be correctly integrated and deployed in the urban environment (Torfing, 2016). The smart city concept is therefore multidimensional and consists of several features such as enhancing the quality of life, adopting ICTs in urban systems, focusing on human capital, favouring public value creation, supporting innovation and reaching a more sustainable territory (Giffinger et al., 2007). Because of such conceptual multidimensionality, ‘the smart city is a somewhat nebulous idea’ (Shelton et al., 2015: 13) subject to different interpretations. It is ambiguous and practitioners often see it as fuzzy, thus attributing different meanings to it (Angelidou, 2014; Kitchin, 2015). Policymakers have therefore developed multiple visions of the smart city concept, ranging from a holistic view – with a broad focus encompassing sustainability and civic participation issues – to a more reductionist understanding which focuses on technological deployment (Mora et al., 2019a).
Consistently with the above-mentioned background, recent scholarship has invited researchers and practitioners to purposefully embrace the polysemic nature of the smart city concept in policy-making. Indeed, since this is a concept that policy-makers can interpret in different ways in different local contexts, it follows that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to smart city policy-making, and city governments can adaptively design and implement smart city strategies that are well situated in their specific context (Nam and Pardo, 2011). These strategies can therefore reflect place-based interpretations that local governments make of their socio-economic contexts (Lu and De Jong, 2019). These interpretations are mostly rooted in a discourse of innovation and in a strong belief in technical solutions to societal problems, such as how to realize and maintain an inclusive, equal, just and sustainable urban environment (Engelbert et al., 2019). As Esposito et al. (2021) suggest, local governments operating in well-established knowledge economy environments characterized by technological as well as human capital abundancy may use smart city programmes as instruments to improve civic participation and the quality of urban services. Conversely, local governments operating in less mature economic and technological contexts may use smart city projects to boost economic growth through the creation of digital business.
When it comes to grasping the multiple interpretations held by policy-makers about a given policy issue, Boltanski and Thévenot’s (1991) framework has proved to be a powerful theoretical and methodological tool. The framework provides a ‘grammar’ enabling researchers to unpack the multiplicity of logics co-existing in a policy field (Esposito et al., 2022; Patriotta et al., 2011). Boltanski and Thévenot identify seven orders of worth (‘Civic’, ‘Fame’, ‘Market’, ‘Industrial’, ‘Domestic’, ‘Inspired’ and ‘Green’) that allow researchers to categorize how actors operating within a given policy domain make sense of a policy issue (see Table 1 in the supplemental material). 1
We propose to use the orders-of-worth basis to explain how different local policy-makers make sense of the smart city concept and formulate concrete projects based on their understanding. To provide an example, justifying a smart city policy in economic terms amounts to the stance that money is a relevant measure of worth and ought to be privileged when such policies are evaluated. This is the case, as shown by Tang et al. (2019), of smart city policies designed and implemented by local governments operating in former industrial manufacturing areas transitioning into the new economy with the ambition to become a hub for high-tech and digital businesses. Within these contexts, policy-makers may argue that economic considerations (or the ‘market’ order of worth) should come first. Nevertheless, local governments operating in different socio-economic contexts may take the view that environmental concerns (or the ‘green’ order of worth) and social concerns (or the ‘civic’ order of worth) should be prioritized no matter what the economic cost. This is the case, for example, of governments operating in local contexts that are economically prosperous and have the ambition of using ICT-enabled innovation to improve issues such as citizens’ participation and environmental sustainability of their urban environments (Esposito et al., 2021).
Data and methods
Empirical setting and data sample
We chose Belgium as an empirical site because it is one of the highest-performing European Union countries in the area of digital policy and smart city development (European Commission, 2018). We particularly chose to study municipalities in the Wallonia region. Since 2015, the Walloon government has adopted Digital Wallonia, consisting of 23 actions in the following 4 areas of activity: (a) empowering digital enterprises; (b) reforming public administration; (c) strengthening the connectivity and smartness of the territory through better ICT infrastructures; and (d) training the Walloon human capital to increase digital literacy. In 2018, the impact of the regional strategy was apparent with 288 smart city projects initiated across the Walloon cities (Vanmarsenille and Desdemoustier, 2018). In 2019, to further boost this positive trend, the regional government launched the call for projects related to ‘Intelligent Territory’, inviting municipal governments to propose smart city projects within three policy pillars: Energy and Environment, Governance and Citizenship, and Mobility and Logistics. Within the framework of this call, Walloon municipalities submitted 88 smart city projects. Geographically, these projects are distributed between the different Walloon Provinces as follows: 10% in Namur, 13% in Walloon Brabant, 21% in Luxembourg, 26% in Hainaut and 30% in Liège. We have built our dataset on the basis of the received 88 project proposals. In order to be properly received, local policy-makers had to fill in a form to identify the nature of their project. For the purposes of this study, the answers provided to question 46 were selected. This question asked about the societal impact expected by the policy-makers after the implementation of their smart city project. We were therefore able to analyse the argumentations that motivate the use of technology in a smart city project to respond to a public problem.
The dataset is made of the following variables: project ID (integer number from 1 to 88), single project name (given by the authors within the attached document proposal), the response text inherent to the item 46, and the assigned theme (3 themes were allowed in the application form: Energy and Environment, Governance and Citizenship, and Mobility and Logistics). Eight documents were scanned documents and thus unable to be efficiently pre-processed. 2 In addition, two more projects did not have answers to question 46. Thus, we ended up with a final dataset of 78 documents. Table 2 in the supplemental material provides a description of the pre-processed data sample (for details on data pre-processing, see Appendix 1 in the supplemental material).
Methods and data analysis
Following the interpretivists’ call for method pluralism (Bevir and Rhodes, 2022), this study employs a multi-method research design combining quantitative analysis through topic modelling with qualitative coding based on justification theory.
In the first stage, in line with Guenduez and Mettler (2023), we used machine learning to explore the hidden thematic structures across the documents. A quantitative analysis was carried out using a computer and statistical language analysis method. We used topic modelling, which represents a set of valuable tools for detecting latent themes (topics) within a collection of documents (Bishop, 2013). In particular, we made use of Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) – the most common unsupervised machine learning technique providing highly interpretable topics on the basis of Bayesian algorithms and Dirichlet probability distributions (Blei, 2012). First, the algorithm has performed a lexical processing of the words used by policy-makers. Then, words gathered according to their occurrence and degree of correlation and the algorithm generated different statistically relevant archetypes. (Appendix 2 in the supplemental material reports the list of the 13 topics each represented by its first most relevant 20 words.) To understand the relative importance of each word for a single topic, weights-per-word are also reported 3 (for details on the topic model see Appendix 1 in the supplemental material).
After having detected the number of topics, we analysed the dominant topic for each document. 4 The latter unveils further insights about the relation between documents and the topic they belong to. Table 3 in the supplemental material shows the percentage of documents (i.e. project proposals) represented by each topic with respect to the total amount of documents in the dataset (see also Appendix 3 in the supplemental material).
In a second stage of the analysis, a qualitative interpretation of the results of the topic model was carried out. More specifically, a second in-depth reading of the call for projects was performed to give meaning to the topics generated by the algorithm and to attach labels to each of them (topic labelling). During this stage, the 13 topics obtained through the LDA-driven quantitative analysis were used as the basis for a qualitative analysis of the project texts adopting Boltanski and Thévenot’s theory as interpretative framework. We indeed coded LDA topics according to Boltanski and Thévenot’s orders of worth as follows: 5 market (topics #2, #9 and #11); domestic (topics #0, #6, #8); industrial (topics #1, #7, #10 and #12); green (topics #4 and #5); and civic (topic #3) (Figure 1 in the supplemental material). This made it possible to clarify and understand the different motivations and argumentations of Walloon local policy-makers and to define the justificatory arguments developed by them.
Findings
Local policy-makers have mostly provided justifications according to the market (35%), domestic (22%) and industrial (22%) orders of worth. Green and civic justifications were less present in the material (14% and 8% respectively). Table 4 in the supplemental material provides a sample of the most relevant quotes from the coded material exemplifying how municipal policy-makers portray their own vision of the smart city.
The market justification: improving attractiveness and strengthening local development
Several municipalities base their vision of the smart city on the desire to increase economic activity in their area. Various policy-makers have indicated their willingness to mobilize new technologies to promote the local and circular economy in their territory. For example, in a project proposal, the importance of digital technologies in encouraging citizens to ‘buy local’ is emphasized. The smart city is seen as an engine of growth for small businesses. Strengthening local trade and short circuits allows a more sustainable development of the territory. This type of initiative gives a boost to local businesses and promotes local economic development. From a practical point of view, some of these municipalities have expressed their enthusiasm for the development of digital platforms for local commerce. These platforms encourage citizens to visit local shops by including incentives and gamification.
The domestic justification: strengthening social links and the communal identity
According to some Walloon municipalities, local development should be achieved through smart city policies that strengthen the local fabric. Here too, digital platforms can be developed. These platforms are pointed out for their role in facilitating interactions between sport and cultural associations (on the one hand) and citizens (on the other). This type of initiative can also strengthen relations between different associations with a view to facilitating the sharing of equipment or public spaces. Overall, policies of this type mobilize technology to make local life more dynamic, improve social cohesion and encourage the dynamics of mutualization.
Some municipalities are aware of the complexity of the global challenges and the mobilization required of everyone to meet them. To effectively initiate a sustainable and intelligent transition and to provide answers to these challenges, they feel it is necessary to strengthen the communal identity of their territory. These municipalities see digital technologies and smart city policies as an opportunity to modernize themselves and increase the sense of belonging of their population. In concrete terms, it is possible to simplify the interaction between civil society, politicians and the administration by setting up digital applications and platforms.
The industrial justification: improving energy consumption, safety, mobility and access to services
Several projects have focused on the implementation of intelligent tools to automate and optimize energy infrastructure. Policy-makers point to positive economic and environmental externalities behind these initiatives. For example, the installation of intelligent thermostatic valves on radiators in municipal buildings makes it possible to automatically turn off the heating when these spaces are unoccupied at night or at weekends. Some devices also allow for a better understanding of the energy consumption of certain buildings and, subsequently, to raise awareness among their occupants.
In some cases, smart city policies and new technologies are highlighted for their ability to address safety issues. For example, the installation of sensors at certain strategic locations on the banks of a river, subject to occasional flooding, makes it possible to prevent flooding by sending an automatic signal to the relevant policy-makers and services. According to several municipalities, digital technologies also offer a solution to traffic jam problems. In concrete terms, a possible solution to such problems is to divide urban areas into limited-time parking zones and through an intelligent signalling system to inform car drivers of the parking time available to them.
Other municipalities have underlined problems about public service access for citizens. For example, some rural areas have a large surface area that does not allow public transport operators to offer adequate services to the population. These municipalities find solutions to these problems in digital technology and smart city policies by setting up multimodal platforms. The idea was put forward to set up an application that would make it possible to find the appropriate mode of transport according to the needs of each citizen.
The green justification: reducing carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and the environmental footprint
Some municipalities want to fully engage in reducing the environmental impact of their community’s actions by improving air quality. Digital technologies can help reduce CO2 emissions in a number of ways. For example, an app can help understand people’s habits and provide personalized advice on how to reduce their environmental impact. To make this more enjoyable, serious game processes can be used. In concrete terms, it is a question of making an environmental approach attractive by setting up a system of trophies, monitoring progress or comparing results with other users. Another type of initiative highlights the usefulness of platforms as facilitators of a local collective self-consumption dynamic. In this case, the municipality is acting to promote the co-production and consumption of sustainable energy within its territory. The application connects different residents who wish to invest in an ecological and mutualization dynamic at the neighbourhood level.
Some municipalities focus their vision of the smart city on the contribution of digital technologies to environmental projects. Digital technologies facilitate the involvement and awareness of citizens behind projects with positive environmental impacts for their territory. Some projects aim to simplify soft mobility modes. For example, one project aimed to regenerate footpaths that, over time, have become unused. Thanks to an application, citizens can list them, and even create new routes, in order to help the municipality bring them back to life and refresh them. Citizens are directly involved in making a change by sending information to the local authority. Other projects also focused on processes to make it easier to use a bicycle for travel. These projects generate behavioural changes and involve citizens in environmentally positive actions.
The civic justification: strengthening the links between public administration and citizens
Some project proposals highlight the role of smart city policies in improving the links between the public administration and citizens, such as using digital technologies to simplify communication. The use of digital tools as an interface between citizens and the administration makes the latter more accessible to the former by strengthening their relationship and improving transparency. In some municipalities, the implementation of digital and interactive notice boards was also envisaged to reduce a potential digital divide. These projects promote a direct link between the administration and the citizens, simplify administrative procedures and promote better cohesion in the territory.
Discussion and conclusion
As we explain below, our findings firstly shed new light on the polysemic nature of the smart city concept showing that local governments can adaptively use smart city projects as instruments to overcome multiple place-based environmental, social and economic problems. Secondly, our study provides policy-makers and practitioners with evidence-based categories that can help them to re-appropriate the smart city concept more easily in order to design and implement technological solutions to what they perceive as the most pressing problems of their territories and populaces.
A polysemic policy instrument to address multiple societal issues
Digitalization is seen as a tool for achieving better governance in that the use of ICTs in the public sector makes it possible to improve efficiency, quality, effectiveness, accountability and trust (Terlizzi, 2021). However, how policy-makers perceive and make sense of these advantages in diverse contexts is a matter of empirical investigation. This article has aimed at contributing to the literature on digital governance and smart cities by investigating how local policy-makers (differently) portray the opportunities offered by the use of digital technologies in city governments. Consistently with recent research (Esposito et al., 2021), this article shows that smart city projects can be understood as policy instruments designed and implemented by local governments to achieve a variety of environmental, social and economic goals. Our findings particularly show that policy-makers justify the development of smart city projects at the municipal level on the basis of different orders of worth. The market, domestic and industrial orders of worth were mobilized to a larger extent than green and civic orders of worth. Within the market order of worth, smart city projects are seen as instruments to boost local economic development, whereas within the domestic and industrial orders of worth these projects are respectively used to strengthen social bonds across members of the local community and to improve the efficiency of urban service provision. When smart city projects are justified based on green and civic orders of worth, policy-makers tend to prioritize respectively the ecological preservation of urban environments and the collaboration between citizens and public administrations. Thus, our work provides evidence on the polysemic nature of smart city policies (cf. Cino Pagliarello, 2022). In our case, multiple interpretations of the smart city concept were facilitated by the regional design of the call for tenders as city-level policy-makers were to provide project proposals in the application form within different policy fields (energy and environment, governance and citizenship, and mobility and logistics). Adding to previous research in this area (Desdemoustier et al., 2019; Nam and Pardo, 2011), we argue that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to smart city development and city-level policy-makers may purposefully attribute different meanings to ICT-enabled innovations by formulating smart city policies that appeal to different orders of worth and address different societal issues.
Government-led smart city policies
Since the beginnings of the smart city movement in the early 2000s, the corporate-led approach to smart urban development has fostered a ‘technology-led urban utopia’ (Hollands, 2015: 61) empowered by global technology providers and their ambition for profit maximization, rather than a genuine interest in improving public value (Mora et al., 2019b). In a corporate-led approach, ICTs and corporate profits are the primary driving forces shaping smart cities (Grossi and Pianezzi, 2017). Conversely, in a government-led approach, the quest for public value and progress towards the achievement of broad and widely accepted societal goals is the key driver of the innovation process (Mazzucato and Ryan-Collins, 2022). In this approach, governmental organizations at different levels provide long-term visions for innovation by crafting discourses around how technology can create and improve the public value (Mazzucato, 2017). By developing further this government-led approach to smart city development, this article has provided several government-led visions of smart city policies based on the empirical investigation of the ‘Intelligent Territory’ call for proposals initiated by the Walloon regional government in 2019 as part of its digital governance strategy. Based on Boltanski and Thévenot’s order of worth theory, our analysis has particularly identified five justifications for smart city development.
The market and industrial justifications are dominant in our analysis, as policy-makers have often mobilized innovation discourses centred on arguments of local economic development (market) and of efficiency improvements of urban service provision (industrial). However, this is different from a corporate-led approach as the key actor is the local government shaping the business environment for local enterprises and directing urban innovation towards economic and efficiency objectives. As argued by Mazzucato and Ryan-Collins (2022: 346), markets can be ‘co-created by the private and public sectors, rather than being created by the former and “fixed” by the latter’. In this respect, governments can adopt a ‘market-shaping’ – rather than a ‘market-fixing’ – role and direct public policy actions in socially desirable directions.
In placing the focus on strengthening social bonds across members of the local community, Belgian governments have also prioritized domestic justifications of smart city development. Moreover, we also found green and civic justifications prioritizing, respectively, environmental objectives and collaboration between citizens and city governments. The presence of the green order of worth echoes the literature showing that the smart city policy discourse has embraced ecological considerations. However, this scholarship also shows that the ecological approach to urban development is often tokenistic and leaves aside wider environmental concerns such as climate justice and biodiversity (see e.g. Biesaga et al., 2023). Further research is needed to deepen the study of how the environment is considered in smart city governmental agendas.
One should not forget that digital governance refers to the use of ICTs ‘to help government to strengthen interactions with citizens and societal actors to solve societal problems collectively’ (Meijer, 2015: 199). Therefore, the smart city innovation projects presented in this article can be broadly seen as digital governance initiatives which, based on our findings, local governments can introduce with different objectives in mind: either to boost local economic development (market) and to improve the effectiveness of urban service provision (industrial) or to strengthen social bonds across members of the local community (domestic), as well as to promote the ecological preservation of urban environments (green) and the collaboration between citizens and public administrations (civic). Overall, by unpacking the variety of smart city policy visions that are shaped within municipal jurisdictions, this article supports the idea that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to digital governance policies as governmental administrations can actively attribute their own meaning to these policies by approaching technology as a means to solve different societal problems – rather than an end per se.
We are aware of the limitations of our study as our results are based on project proposals prior to their implementation. This means that we are not able to claim whether the smart city projects we have analysed have effectively achieved the societal objectives stated in the proposal texts. We are not able to say to what extent the smart city projects proposed by municipal governments are effectively aligned with and reflect the ambitions of local needs. To achieve this, more in-depth and process-tracing research is needed in order to unpack how governmental actors (e.g. elected officials, government bureaucrats and civil servants) develop smart city policy visions in conjunction with citizens. It would be important to understand the formation of networks of public, private and civic actors, and the process through which they develop relational ties with a view to develop a truly bottom-up smart city programme that sustains social change and promotes the public interest.
Supplemental Material
sj-docx-1-ras-10.1177_00208523231167538 - Supplemental material for Interpreting digital governance at the municipal level: Evidence from smart city projects in Belgium
Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-ras-10.1177_00208523231167538 for Interpreting digital governance at the municipal level: Evidence from smart city projects in Belgium by Giovanni Esposito, Andrea Terlizzi, Massimo Guarino and Nathalie Crutzen in International Review of Administrative Sciences
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
Earlier versions of this article were presented at the Società Italiana di Scienza Politica (SISP) conference (9–11 September 2021, Italy) and the XIV Espanet Italy conference (8–11 September 2021). We gratefully acknowledge the helpful suggestions made by the participants. We would also like to thank Félix Capelle, Maria Tullia Galanti, Robin Heynen, Giorgia Nesti, Alessandro Sancino, Fulvio Scognamiglio and the two anonymous reviewers for their valuable and constructive comments.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Notes
References
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