Albert Meijer

Utrecht University | UU

Smart city projects rely upon dynamic and complex multi-stakeholder collaboration. This collaboration can be challenging. In this study, we use an instrumental lens and argue that tools can help public professionals in dealing with smart governance challenges. Building upon smart governance and collaborative governance models, we conceptualize smar...

Governments across the world are experimenting with smart city technologies but recent studies suggest that not all citizens support this development. However, a comprehensive understanding of citizen discontent with the smart city is missing. This study systematically reviews academic research addressing citizen discontent with the smart city. Bas...

In terms of the inclusivity of democracy, both the opportunities and risks of using digital media have been highlighted in the literature. Empirical research into the use of digital media and the inclusivity of citizen participation, however, is limited. More specifically, we have a limited understand of the relation between the ‘richness’ of digit...

Transparency and the efficiency of multi-actor decision-making processes : an empirical analysis of 244 decisions in the European Union Studies into decision-making suggest the existence of a tension between transparent and efficient decision-making. It is assumed that an increase in transparency leads to a decline in the efficiency of decision-mak...

This study focuses on an important yet often neglected topic in public personnel competency studies: competencies required for digital government. It addresses the question: Which competencies do civil servants need for data-driven decision-making (DDDM) in local governments? Empirical data are obtained through a combination of 12 expert interviews...

Recently, we have seen a rising interest in the study of complex systems in public administration. This paper demonstrates how specific design interventions, also referred to as ‘probes’, can be used to investigate complex systems. The value of this strategy is demonstrated by probing three open data ecosystems in the Netherlands. The probes produc...

Social media institutionalization in public administrations has been conceptualized as the final stage of the adoption process. However, an understanding of organizational models for social media institutionalization in public administration is lacking. This exploratory study of Dutch local governments contributes to the literature by identifying h...

The current scientific debate on algorithms in the public sector is dominated by a focus on technology rather than organizational patterns. This paper extends our understanding of these patterns by studying the algorithmization of bureaucratic organizations, which is the process in which an organization rearranges its working routines around the us...

This chapter develops a theoretical perspective on the path dependency of smart cities. Our perspective will highlight both the physical and social dimensions of path dependency and also reflect on their interrelations. We will present a case study of the city of Rotterdam in the Netherlands to show the value of this perspective on the smart city....

This article focuses on understanding the dynamics of citizen participation in smart city initiatives. The literature identifies citizens as key actors in smart cities, however, our understanding of their roles and influence is underdeveloped. Using modes of urban governance to provide contextual depth, alongside the literature on citizen participa...

Dekker and Meijer provide an account of how European law-enforcement professionals negotiate the boundaries between accepted and unsanctioned online engagements among digital media audiences. These developments are largely made meaningful by notions of community policing, in which local context and collaboration with the authorities are pivotal fac...

Governments around the world are utilizing data and information systems to manage the COVID-19-crisis. To obtain an overview of all these efforts, this global report presents the expert reports of 21 countries regarding the relation between the COVID-19-crisis and the information polity. A comparative analysis of these reports highlights that gover...

Studies into decision-making suggest the existence of a tension between transparent and efficient decision-making. It is assumed that an increase in transparency leads to a decline in the efficiency of decision-making processes; however, this assumption has not been tested empirically. This study provides a starting point for investigating the comp...

The positive features of innovation are well known but the dark side of public innovation has received less attention. To fill this gap, this article develops a theoretical understanding of the dark side of public innovation. We explore a diversity of perverse effects on the basis of a literature review and an expert consultation. We indicate that...

Open Data work : understanding Open Data usage from a practice lens During recent years, the amount of data released on platforms by public administrations around the world have exploded. Open government data platforms are aimed at enhancing transparency and participation. Even though the promises of these platforms are high, their full potential h...

Public organizations often face numerous barriers when it comes to adopting and using social media to communicate and engage with the broader public. This research aims to better understand how barriers to social media adoption can be tackled by zooming in on one specific type of organization: the police. Our research answers the following question...

Social and sustainable initiatives generally start small and need to scale to create substantial impact. Our systematic review of 133 articles develops a better understanding of this scaling process. From the literature, we conceptualize impact as the result of two different pathways: ‘scaling out’ (extending geographical space or volume) and ‘scal...

Our exploration of three bodies of literature – public management, accounting and urban governance – shows that three views on these new technological practices of ‘urban auditing’ are present in the literature: a technocratic, a critical and an emergent view. We use these three views to introduce the six papers in this special issue. We conclude...

There is increasing debate about the role that public policy research can play in identifying solutions to complex policy challenges. Most studies focus on describing and explaining how governance systems operate. However, some scholars argue that because current institutions are often not up to the task, researchers need to rethink this 'bystander...

This article contributes to the growing body of literature within public management on open government data by taking a political perspective. We argue that open government data are a strategic resource of organizations and therefore organizations are not likely to share it. We develop an analytical framework for studying the politics of open gover...

This paper presents a systematic review of the literature on smart governance, defined as technology-enabled collaboration between citizens and local governments to advance sustainable development. The lack of empirical evidence on the positive outcomes of smart cities/smart governance motivated us to conduct this study. Our findings show that empi...

Living labs have become a promising methodology for public administration research to design and study public innovations. Surprisingly, public administration research has paid scant attention to living labs to date. An obvious obstacle to the application of a living lab approach in public administration is unclarities about the value, validity and...

This paper develops a theoretical understanding of the management of value conflicts in public innovation. Drawing from the literatures on public values and on public innovation, various strategic approaches to managing conflict are discussed, conceptualized, and applied to two cases. The paper identifies three basic approaches for dealing with val...

This theoretical viewpoint paper presents a new perspective on urban governance in an information age. Smart city governance is not only about technology but also about re-organizing collaboration between a variety of actors. The introduction of new tools for open collaboration in the public domain is rapidly changing the way collaborative action i...

Social media is being used by a large part of local administrations. As a highly disruptive adopted innovation, it is important to understand the process of institutionalization through empirical variables. This paper studies the Dutch case to analyze to what extent social media technologies have being institutionalized within major city councils i...

Open government data are claimed to contribute to transparency, citizen participation, collaboration, economic and public service development. From an innovation perspective, we explore the current gap between the promise and practice of open government data. Based on Strategic Niche Management (SNM), we identify different phases in the open data i...

This literature review illuminates the conceptualization of predictive policing, and also its potential and realized benefits and drawbacks. The review shows a discrepancy between the considerable attention for potential benefits and drawbacks of predictive policing in the literature, and the empirical evidence that is available. The empirical evid...

Citizen-generated open data is the data that individuals consciously generate and that are openly available for use in the public domain. The promise of citizen-generated data is that it generates a basis for public governance. We conducted an explorative comparative case study research of 25 cases in different countries to enhance our understandin...

Transparency and responsiveness are core values of democratic governments, yet do Freedom of Information Laws - one of the legal basis for such values - actually help to increase these values? This paper reports a replication of a field experiment testing for the responsiveness of public authorities by Worthy et al (2016) in the United Kingdom. We...

Governments around the world are pressed to develop innovative solutions for the wicked problems they are facing. To develop these solutions, the public innovation capacity—defined as the capacity to develop and realize new ideas for societal problems—is of crucial importance. This article builds a model of the public innovation capacity on the bas...

In the study of public administration, e-government has been the focus of significant studies, and this number has been growing in recent years. This introduction to the virtual special issue of JPART on e-government highlights key contributions of selected JPART articles to the knowledge about information and technologies in government. In that se...

Human-driven changes on this planet have been giving rise to global warming, social instability, civil wars, and acts of terrorism. The existing system of global governance is not equipped to effectively address these enormous challenges. It is slow where one must move quickly, favors bureaucracy and politics over authentic deliberations and effect...

This is an appendix to the article "United People: designing a new model of global governance", available here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/324983643_United_People_Designing_a_New_Model_of_Global_Governance This appendix provides background information on the principles informing the UP model, creating councils within this model, get...

During recent years, the amount of data released on platforms by public administrations around the world have exploded. Open government data platforms are aimed at enhancing transparency and participation. Even though the promises of these platforms are high, their full potential has not yet been reached. Scholars have identified technical and qual...

The use of social media produces new value conflicts in public governance. The police force is a public organization directly confronted with these changes. However, there is no systematic understanding of these conflicts in daily police practice or of the coping strategies used. This article presents an explorative understanding of the value confl...

Smart cities are presented as both inevitable and benign futures: the technological development is unstoppable and will bring us wealthier, safer and more sustainable cities. Putting technology to use, however, is never entirely a matter of engineering but of strategic, political and value-laden choices. This article combines the literature on tech...

The rapid deployment of technology in urban settings drastically changes the way urban safety is being governed. This article investigates smart governance of urban safety empirically through an in-depth case study of a project to improve the safety of a street in the Dutch city of Eindhoven. This collaboration between the city government, technolo...

Developments in open data have prompted a range of proposals and innovations in the domain of governance and public administration. Within the democratic tradition, transparency is seen as a fundamental element of democratic governance. While the use of open government data has the potential to enhance transparency and trust in government, realisin...

In this paper we present innovative solutions to the problem of transparency in Public Administrations (PAs) by opening up public data and services so that citizens participation is facilitated and encouraged with a Social Platform and a personalized user-friendly Transparency-Enhancing Toolset.

Governments around the world make their data available through platforms but, disappointingly, the use of this data is lagging behind. This problem has been recognized in the literature and to facilitate use of open datasets, scholars have focused on identifying general user requirements for open data platform design. This approach however fails to...

This paper presents a comprehensive overview of the literature on the types, effects, conditions and user of Open Government Data (OGD). The review analyses 101 academic studies about OGD which discuss at least one of the four factors of OGD utilization: the different types of utilization, the effects of utilization, the key conditions, and the dif...

Open data platforms are hoped to foster democratic processes, yet recent empirical research shows that so far they have failed to do so. We argue that current open data platforms do not take into account the complexity of democratic processes which results in overly simplistic approaches to open data platform design. Democratic processes are multif...

Urban technological innovation—the innovative use of technologies to tackle urban problems—has become increasingly popular under the label smart city. Our understanding of this sociotechnical process is limited, and therefore, this article develops a framework on the basis of the literature on social and technological innovation. This framework ide...

This chapter presents a local emergent perspective on smart city governance. Smart city governance is about using new technologies to develop innovative governance arrangements. Cities all around the world are struggling to find smart solutions to wicked problems and they hope to learn from successful techno-governance practices in other cities. Le...

Purpose Coproduction fundamentally changes the roles of citizens and governments. The purpose of this paper is to enhance the theoretical understanding of the transformative changes in the structural order of the public domain that result from the coproduction of public services. Design/methodology/approach This paper builds upon both the literatu...

Political innovations aim to strengthen democracy but few connect well to the institutionalized democratic context. This paper explores how political innovations can be successfully embedded in existing democratic systems. It builds upon both the literature on political innovation and on new democratic arrangements and studies a practice of aleator...

Governing the smart city: a review of the literature on smart urban governance Academic attention to smart cities and their governance is growing rapidly, but the fragmentation in approaches makes for a confusing debate. This article brings some structure to the debate by analyzing a corpus of 51 publications and mapping their variation. The analys...

Academic attention to smart cities and their governance is growing rapidly, but the fragmentation in approaches makes for a confusing debate. This article brings some structure to the debate by analyzing a corpus of 51 publications and mapping their variation. The analysis shows that publications differ in their emphasis on (1) smart technology, sm...

This article examines to what extent transparency is a condition for the creation of public value. Transparency is usually narrowly defined as a tool for external stakeholders to monitor the internal workings of an organization, but public value management positions transparency as a broader instrument for actively engaging stakeholders. We investi...

Technology development and democratization have been identified as the general drivers of the worldwide thrust in transparency. But what transparency regimes do these drivers generate in different countries? This mixed method study indicates that national regimes are different due to pre-existing institutional differences and critical junctures in...

In this short paper, we introduce ROUTE-TO-PA project, funded by European Union under the Horizon 2020 program, whose aim is to improve the transparency of Public Administration, by allowing citizens to make better use of Open Data, through collaboration and personalization.

There are three issues that are crucial to advancing our academic understanding of smart cities: (1) contextual conditions, (2) governance models, and (3) the assessment of public value. A brief review of recent literature and the analysis of the included papers provide support for the assumption that cities cannot simply copy good practices but mu...

The attention for Smart governance, a key aspect of Smart cities, is growing, but our conceptual understanding of it is still limited. This article fills this gap in our understanding by exploring the concept of Smart governance both theoretically and empirically and developing a research model of Smart governance. On the basis of a systematic revi...

How can we evaluate government transparency arrangements? While the complexity and contextuality of the values at stake defy straightforward measurement, this article provides an interpretative framework to guide and structure assessments of government transparency. In this framework, we discern criteria clusters for political transparency—democrac...

Theoretical fragmentation in e-government studies hampers the further development of this field of study. This paper argues that a metatheory can reduce theoretical confusion. Ideas from the philosophy of the social sciences are used to develop a metatheory of e-government consisting of three dimensions: explaining/understanding, holism/individuali...

Social media use has become increasingly popular among police forces. The literature suggests that social media use can increase perceived police legitimacy by enabling transparency and participation. Employing data from a large and representative survey of Dutch citizens (N = 4,492), this article tests whether and how social media use affects perc...

Various models have been developed to explain the adoption of e-government but systematic research on barriers to e-governance is lacking. On the basis of the literature, this paper develops a theoretical model of e-governance innovation that highlights (1) phases in the innovation process, (2) government and citizen barriers and (3) structural and...

This article presents an analysis of the history of government transparency over the past 250 years. While this analysis is to a certain extent specific to The Netherlands, the analysis will also identify more general patterns that are arguably relevant to the development of transparency in other Western countries. The overview highlights how, when...

This paper presents an analysis of the impact of e-government studies on theories of policy change. A literature review of key journals in the policy sciences shows that in these journals the relation between technology and policy change receives little attention. Whilst more nuanced analyses of technology and policy change are presented in e-gover...

Social media are becoming increasingly important for communication between government organisations and citizens. Although research on this issue is expanding, the structure of these new communication patterns is still poorly understood. This study contributes to our understanding of these new communication patterns by developing an explanatory mod...

Disclosure of information is an increasingly popular policy instrument. While the use of disclosed information by consumers has been studied, little is known the disclosure practices of organizations. The central question in this paper is: how do organizations translate the trade-off between legal and communicative quality into an organizational ar...

This paper focuses on the processes and strategies of advocates and opponents in creating, maintaining and/or contesting the protective spaces in which ‘urgently needed’ but ‘risky’ pharmaceutical innovations are managed. Drawing on transition literature and recent work on niche protection, this paper adds to the conceptualisation and empirical gro...

This chapter challenges existing impact assessments of open data in the public sector for three reasons: (1) the exclusive focus on economic effects of open data and not on other desirables such as a clean environment, good education, equitable health care, etc.; (2) the assumed linear relation between open data and impacts that ignores the dynamic...

Building on the literature on collaborative leadership, this paper explores the roles of individual persons in processes of public innovation. On the basis of a literature review, a heuristic model is developed that consists of roles at different levels (entrepreneurial leadership versus innovation realization) and in different phases (idea generat...

The development of access to documents and open meetings provisions by the Council of Ministers of the European Union shows an interesting pattern: before 1992 no formal transparency provisions existed, between 1992 and 2006 formal transparency provisions dramatically increased, and since 2006 this increase has come to a halt. This paper aims to en...

Although the effect of government transparency on trust is heavily debated, our theoretical and empirical understanding of this relationship is still limited. The basic assumption tested in this article is whether transparency leads to higher levels of perceived trustworthiness. This article uses theories from social psychology to advance our under...

Disclosure of information is an increasingly popular policy instrument. While the use of disclosed information by consumers has been studied, little is known the disclosure practices of organizations. The central question in this paper is: how do organizations translate the trade-off between legal and communicative quality into an organizational ar...

Within a short timeframe, social media have become to be widely used in government organizations. Social media gurus assume that the transformational capacities of social media result in similar communication strategies in different organizations. According to them, government is transforming into a user-generated state. This paper investigates thi...

Targeted transparency has become a popular regulatory instrument, but its effects are fuzzy because disclosure does not always lead to better compliance. To understand this fuzziness, it is necessary to study the meanings managers attribute to disclosure systems. An empirical analysis of disclosure systems for food safety in Denmark and for environ...

This paper starts with the observation that liberal and discursive perspectives have been dominant in academic analyses of the role of technology in the future of democracy. The perspective of democracy as a participatory practice is largely ignored by academic investigations of electronic democracy. This paper argues that new technologies increasi...

The physicist Neils Bohr allegedly wrote that "Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future". Many academics believe that serious scholars should never attempt to write about the future, but some awareness of the ways in which the future of e-government may evolve is needed if well-grounded long-term decisions about issues such as infr...

This article contributes to the growing body of literature on government transparency by developing a model for studying the construction of transparency in interactions between governments and stakeholders. Building on theories about complex decision making, a heuristic model is developed that consists of a strategic, a cognitive, and an instituti...

The exclusive position of scientific expertise in pharmaceutical regulation is being increasingly challenged. Several authors suggest that lay knowledge could play a role in governing risks. We use the literature to develop ideal-typical regulatory arrangements with low and high lay stakeholder involvement: a technocratic and a democratic arrangeme...

Social interactions in every domain of human activity are transformed through the use of new media. This study provides a preliminary assessment of the value of new media for co-production between government and (communities of) citizens. This article analyzes innovative practices in the Netherlands of new media usage to support the coproduction of...

The new media have been argued to strengthen the coproduction of safety by reducing the costs of interactions between government and citizens and providing new communicative potential. Does that lead to relevant additional input from citizens in police work? Or are preexisting interactions reproduced online? This empirical study of police practices...

The development of access to documents and open meetings provisions by the Council of Ministers of the European Union shows an interesting pattern: before 1992 no formal transparency provisions existed, between 1992 and 2006 formal transparency provisions dramatically increased and since 2006 this increase has come to a halt. This paper aims to enh...

This paper starts with the observation that liberal and discursive perspectives have been dominant in academic analyses of the role of technology in the future of democracy. The perspective of democracy as a participatory practice is largely ignored by academic investigations of electronic democracy. This paper argues that new technologies increasi...

While the development of e-government since the early 1990s has been characterized by many successful applications and systems, it has also been notable for a number of failures to fully realise visions and for several stalled ideas. Governments, professionals ...

The term open government is often used to describe initiatives of putting government information on the Internet. This conceptualization is too restricted since open government is not only about openness in informational terms ( vision) but also about openness in interactive terms ( voice). On the basis of an analysis of 103 articles, this article...