Interpreting digital governance at the municipal level: Evidence from smart city projects in Belgium
| Published date | 01 June 2024 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/00208523231167538 |
| Author | Giovanni Esposito,Andrea Terlizzi,Massimo Guarino,Nathalie Crutzen |
| Date | 01 June 2024 |
Interpreting digital
governance at the
municipal level: Evidence
from smart city projects in
Belgium
Giovanni Esposito
HEC Liège Management School, University of Liège, Belgium
Free University of Brussels, Belgium
Andrea Terlizzi
University of Florence, Italy
Massimo Guarino∗
Italian Ministry of Culture, Italy
Nathalie Crutzen
University of Liège, Belgium
Abstract
This article adopts an interpretive approach to investigate how local policy-makers por-
tray and justify their own visions of digital governance initiatives at the municipal level.
Our investigation focuses on smart city projects submitted by various Belgian municipal-
ities 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 justifica-
tions 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
∗The opinions expressed are those of the author only and should not be considered as representative of the
institution of affiliation.
Corresponding author:
Giovanni Esposito, HEC Liège Management School, Universityof Liège, Rue Louvrex, 14, 4000, Liège, Belgium.
Email: gesposito@uliege.be
Article
International
Review of
Administrative
Sciences
International Review of Administrative
Sciences
2024, Vol. 90(2) 301–317
© The Author(s) 2023
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/00208523231167538
journals.sagepub.com/home/ras
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
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 govern-
ment and society. Within this context, public policy and administration scholars have
devoted growing attention to the digital transformation, defined as ‘the processof implementing
ICT-enabled government innovations’(Barcevic
̌ius et al., 2019: 10). While early debates nar-
rowly 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 develop-
ments 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 infrastruc-
ture, civil servants’ICT expertise) of public sector organizations (Meijer et al., 2018).
302 International Review of Administrative Sciences 90(2)
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