Smart governance in the context of smart cities: A literature review

Abstract

This literature review has focused on smart governance as an emerging domain of study that attracts significant scientific and policy attention. More specifically, this paper aims to provide more insight in the definitions of and relationships between smart governance and concepts such as smart and electronic government, in the context of smart cities. The literature review shows that smart government can be considered as a basis for developing smart governance, through the application of emergent information and communication technologies (ICT) for governing. Smart governance as the intelligent use of ICT to improve decision-making through better collaboration among different stakeholders, including government and citizens, can be strongly related to government approaches. In this case ICT-based tools, such as social media, and openness can be factors that increase citizen engagement and support the development of new governance models for smart government. Smart governance may also have an important role in smart city initiatives, which require complex interactions between governments, citizens and other stakeholders. Based on the literature review, this paper coins a definition of ‘smart city governance’ and contributes to developing a framework for building new, smart governance models addressing the challenges of the digital society, collaborative governance, information sharing, citizen engagement, transparency and openness.