Reducing CO2 Emissions by Smart City Governance? An Empirical Analysis of Smart City Governance in Three Smart City Projects.

Abstract

Many cities are facing increasing environmental challenges regarding air pollution, congestion, waste management, and human health. Over the last decade, the concept of ‘smart cities’ has been gradually given attention to, in hope that the use of new technologies could help to effectively address and solve these challenges. However, it has become clear that the sole use of technologies is not sufficient to manage a smart city and overcome challenges. In the context of a smart city, a new, innovative, and ICT-based form of governance has been conceptualized as smart city governance. This concept has been considered the solution to successfully govern the smart city. The small amount of literature on smart city governance, and the unclear concepts and definitions derived from this literature led to the creation of a new smart city governance model that could be applied in practice. This model consists of eight elements, and governance challenges, which can influence the aspired outcome. For this research, a specific focus was laid on the CO2 mitigation outcome, as this is currently being seen as one of the most important objectives of the smart city. Therefore, this thesis researched the influence smart city governance can have on CO2 mitigation. The model has been tested in three smart city projects in Rotterdam, Umeå, and Glasgow, consisting of 32 smart initiatives, where CO2 mitigation was one of the main objectives. A questionnaire and interviews were held among three different stakeholder groups in the city projects, namely government stakeholders, private companies, and researchers. This allowed assessing the presence of smart city governance in the city projects, identifying the challenges and successes, and comparing different perspectives.

Comparing the three cities showed that in the in city project with the lowest presence of smart city governance, the most challenges were identified, which could endanger the CO2 mitigation goals in the project. It is concluded that smart city governance indirectly contributes to reducing CO2 emissions and reaching CO2 mitigation goals of smart city projects, as it can play an important role to which extent an initiative will succeed. Different smart city governance elements can have a different amount of influence on this. Finally, it was argued that smart city governance can help to address and redress the challenges and help to increase the chance of smart city projects successfully reaching their CO2 mitigation goals.