2018•04•18     Ambato

As in 2017, UNU-EGOV took part once again at the International Conference on eDemocracy & eGovernment. For its 5th edition, the host city was Ambato, located in the Andean valley of Ecuador. The conference was held from 4 to 6 April 2018 at Ambato’s Technical University. The main objective of the conference is to discuss the regions’s transition to an information and knowledge society that will accelerate and enhance regional economic, social, cultural, and technological development and exchange.

The Tutorial on Smart Governance for Smart Cities was delivered by Postdoctoral Fellow Nuno Lopes. The full abstract of the Tutorial can be viewed below.

According to Giffinger, aspects related to political participation, public services and administration should be ruled under a Smart Governance model, and according to Scholl, Smart Governance should be seen as a strand of electronic governance. Smart Governance deals with all the complexity related to supporting a city, region or a nation governance towards a smart city, region or nation, with suitable technologies, information systems, human and financial resources, policies, laws, regulations, norms and best practices. Thus, it is not surprising that they are being used all over the world to address the emerging urbanization challenges and to achieve the Global Sustainable Development Goals stated in the United Nations Agenda 2030.

This tutorial attempts to provide an important contribution to these questions: 1) What sort of Smart Governance models are being implemented in smart initiatives?; 2) Which methodologies are being used to have a Smart Governance?; 3) Which sort of indicators can be used to measure Smart Governance performance and 4) How Smart Governance can be implemented? The outline of the tutorial is organized in order to answer these questions, which are substantiated by thorough study conducted by the UNU-EGOV team on smart cities. The study claims that advanced technologies, innovation and smart governance are essential prerequisites for developing smart, creative, innovative and sustainable cities, regions and countries. However, given the diversity of contexts (e.g. economic, cultural, social, political, organizational, technological, etc.), challenges (e.g. political, governmental, social, cultural, technical, etc.), risks (e.g. organizational, technical, human capacity, etc.) and goals (e.g. economic development, environmental sustainability, quality of life, etc.) is not an easily task to find suitable solutions even with a Smart Governance model behind. For addressing this issue, a context-specific framework for smart initiatives will be explored.

Group picture at the end of the conference.