The Complexity of Governing Smart Cities—An Integrated Approach

Abstract

Smart Cities are emerging as a strategy to manage the problems generated by urban population growth and rapid urbanization. The push for sustainable growth via the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), as well as the motivation of companies to adopt the Integrated Reporting (IR) framework (which also echoes sustainable value creation) interlinks the collaborative governance relationship between global institutions, countries, government, businesses and the public. The comparison of smart governance or e-governance, to the traditional concept of good governance is relevant to ensure consistency of goals and motivations, across all levels of stakeholders. This study initially identified firms recognized for their financial reporting, as a proxy for firm level good governance, which were then grouped into the top five countries based on frequency. The countries identified were UK (17%), Sweden (12%), Germany (11%), Japan (11%) and France (8%). All five countries are developed nations and are members of the OECD and UN. The results suggest an interesting “East meets West” perspective, with each of the countries reflecting different cultural values that motivate the route to good governance. The five countries were initially measured using the traditional measures of good governance and culture, and subsequently compared to e-governance and e-participation indexes. Data for this research have been extracted from reliable sources such as the World Bank, United Nations, Transparency International, World Justice Project and OECD. The research reports inconsistent results when using different basis of assessments, which indicates the lack of integration across goals and methods, differing between platform and the genuine intent to participate or to allow participation.