Governing smart city implementation in the Global South: An institutionalization gap in Chiang Mai, Thailand

Smart city development has become a central policy agenda worldwide, but its implementation commonly reveals a persistent gap between strategic aspiration and operational practice. This study examines how smart city policy is implemented in Chiang Mai Province, Thailand. Integrating perspectives from policy implementation, collaborative governance, and neo-institutional theory, we develop a five-construct framework spanning policy clarity, organizational capacity, translation, coordination and collaboration, and monitoring. Using a holistic single-case design, we analyzed 36 in-depth interviews with 32 participants (i.e., 21 from provincial agencies and local governments forming the analytic core, and 11 from community, social-enterprise, and voluntary-sector organizations as triangulating voices), corroborated against national planning documents, provincial development plans, and provincial Chief Information Officer committee records. Findings reveal systematic variation in policy clarity: provincial coordinators articulate strategic, multidimensional interpretations, sectoral agencies reduce the policy to technological tools, and several primary-sector agencies show no recognition of it. This variation coincides with uneven translation, thin collaboration, and weakly institutionalized monitoring. We theorize this configuration as an institutionalization gap: smart city activities exist at each implementation stage but are not embedded into the routines, inter-agency systems, and monitoring that would bind them into a coherent governance architecture. The study specifies shared understanding as a precondition rather than an outcome of collaborative governance and draws implications for Thailand’s certification regime and Global South smart city policy.