Abstract
Smart cities bring with them the promise of a new period of participatory government. An important ingredient of this political renaissance must be increased fiscal transparency. This is not possible without tools to assess the state of transparency efforts and move them to adequate performance. Excellence in assessment is the key to adequate programming. This chapter looks at the state of online fiscal transparency, assesses how it is currently measured, and offers a framework for improving the assessment of online fiscal transparency in smart cities.
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Notes
- 1.
This definition of accountability is meant to avoid the synecdoche of identifying retribution for misdeeds or failures as constituting “accountability” as well as the common but not always correct normative presumption that accountability is always a beneficial force leading to better governance (see for example Dubnick 2005).
- 2.
Although Held’s analytic distinction between protective and developmental goals of popular self-governance is useful for current purposes, neither Held nor the current authors would claim that all actually existing systems of representative government or specific mechanisms and institutions within those systems cannot serve both purposes. For example, participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre and other Brazilian cities appears to serve both protective and developmental ends, by developing human and social capital as well as directing public capital investment in ways that more effectively serve the health and economic needs of low-income communities (see Fung 2006).
- 3.
The third dimension of Fung’s (2006) cube is how authoritative the decisions of participants are.
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David, N., Justice, J., McNutt, J. (2015). Smart Cities Are Transparent Cities: The Role of Fiscal Transparency in Smart City Governance. In: Rodríguez-Bolívar, M. (eds) Transforming City Governments for Successful Smart Cities. Public Administration and Information Technology, vol 8. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-03167-5_5
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