Exploring Smart Governance Challenges in Local Governments: Insights from a Delphi Study in Spain

Smart governance is a recent concept that aims to improve public services and the management of cities and territories through an open government to civil society and the intensive and intelligent use of ICT. However, despite the availability of legal frameworks and technologies, citizen participation is still occasional, is not integrated into the comprehensive public policy cycle, and is not based on data or knowledge. Thus, there is a risk that public decisions and services are not aligned with citizens’ needs, are costly, or are of low quality. Based on literature insights, we hypothesized that the lack of knowledge-based and comprehensive solutions, as well as conceptual frameworks, system models and technological tools, could be hindering the smart governance implementation. To validate our hypothesis, we decided to study the real state of smart governance implementation in local governments of Seville province (Spain) through the expert opinion of public managers. Previously its key aspects and implementation barriers were identified in the literature. To this end, we conducted anonymous surveys of 19 public employees (experts in citizen participation and e-government) in successive rounds in search of consensus (Delphi method) on these issues in relation to how they were addressing them and how they would like to improve them. The results showed consensus in low citizen participation and collaborative decision-making, and the desire to improve it in frequency and depth, involving the business and professional sectors. Furthermore, it revealed a lack of specialized personnel, tools and technical resources to carry out participatory processes and collaboration among stakeholders, especially for complex and integrated processes based on data and shared knowledge. Furthermore a great variability of these processes was evidenced. Therefore, we could conclude that providing technological resources for smart governance, such as implementation frameworks, models and tools, would help institutions and ICT providers to develop integrated smart governance solutions in the complex and variable context of the e-government ecosystem. Our study is original since it focuses on the implementation problem, both how it is and how it should be, reviews the needs of specific types of participatory processes (e.g., participatory budgeting or citizen consultations), government areas, and considers localities of different sizes. So, it provides valuable insights to guide smart governance implementation in a general way in local governments.