Giovanni Esposito

• PhD - Economics and Management
• PhD Student at University of Liège

Cet article examine la manière dont les acteurs locaux définissent l’agenda du développement durable. En nous appuyant sur les économies de la grandeur, nous expliquons comment les acteurs s’appuient sur des mondes multiples pour évaluer ce qui a de la valeur, ce qui n’en a pas, et pour promouvoir leurs points de vue. Sur le plan empirique, nous no...

Explanations for collective action focus on both institutions and narratives. On the one hand, institutional approaches emphasize the role of rules that guide human behavior. On the other hand, accounting for the narratives through which policy actors make sense of their actions helps in understanding strategic behavior. However, applying instituti...

This study pioneers the use of citizen science in evaluating Freedom of Information laws, with a focus on Belgium, where since its 1994 enactment, Freedom of Information’s effectiveness has remained largely unexamined. Utilizing participatory methods, it engages citizens in assessing transparency policies, significantly contributing to public polic...

Sustainable urban development (SUD) gained prominence after the launch of the Sustainable Development Goals (2015-2030), countering imbalanced growth that was impacting society, the economy, and the environment. Research on SUD is rapidly expanding among scholars and practitioners, analysing theoretical and empirical aspects. However, SUD encounter...

Freedom of information has gained attention all over the globe. While this principle has been embraced in most countries, previous studies showed that obstacles impede its full realization. This article adds to this strand of research by analyzing barriers that emerge in FOI implementation by Belgian municipalities. The results highlight a lack of...

In this chapter, we propose a strategic framework for capacity-building in cross-border transport megaprojects. First, we make the case for infrastructure megaprojects as wicked policy fields marked by a complex web of stakeholders' interests and characterized by uncertainty and entrenched value divergence and conflict. Second, inspired by Pettigre...

Cet article adopte une approche interprétative pour étudier la manière dont les décideurs politiques locaux représentent et justifient leurs propres visions des initiatives de gouvernance numérique au niveau municipal. Notre enquête se concentre sur les projets de villes intelligentes soumis par diverses municipalités belges dans le cadre de l’appe...

This research evaluates the effectiveness of FOI policy implementation in Belgian municipalities, using citizen science methodologies for data collection and interpretation. The results reveal significant variations in compliance across regions, with larger municipalities demonstrating greater responsiveness to FOI requests from citizens. A critica...

This article adopts an interpretive approach to investigate how local policy-makers portray and justify their own visions of digital governance initiatives at the municipal level. Our investigation focuses on smart city projects submitted by various Belgian municipalities in the framework of the ‘Intelligent Territory’ call for proposals initiated...

This article examines Performance Management Systems (PMSs) as socio-technical policy instruments for shaping power relations in megaprojects. Employing an abductive approach, it innovatively applies Foucault's Panopticon theory to the case of the Lyon-Turin railway, a megaproject funded by the European Union's Trans-European Transport Network poli...

This article examines how mayors in Belgium facilitate smart city development through interactions with actors in public administrations, businesses, and civil society. By applying public entrepreneurship and actor-network theories, it explores actions mayors can take to establish urban innovation networks. The research reveals mayors' crucial role...

This paper examines how local actors set the sustainability agenda. By relying on the economies of worth, we explain how actors dwell upon multiple worlds to evaluate what is valuable, what is not valuable, and to promote their views. Empirically, we draw evidence from the Walloon region in Belgium, by investigating how multiple actors discuss thei...

By relying on province‐level data from Italy, this paper empirically studies the factors that correlate with the development of third sector organizations (TSOs) in the Italian territory. Moving beyond traditional explanations of TSOs development based on population heterogeneity theories, our analysis points to the role of public institutions as k...

Megaprojects are now as important as ever. As a response to the pandemic, the European Union has put forward the Next Generation EU policy, making available a 2021–2027 long-term budget of €1.8 trillion to fund projects with ecological and digital applications in the field of telecommunication, transportation, and energy infrastructures. Similarly,...

Megaprojects are increasingly common across countries and attract substantial political attention from a variety of actors. Recent studies have highlighted the need to move from an understanding of megaprojects as linear and rational processes towards a more nuanced approach that accounts for non-linear and conflictual aspects. Participatory govern...

This article explores the role of New Public Management (NPM) ideas in the reform of the Italian and Danish health systems. In particular, it investigates the arguments that have supported changes in their institutional and territorial dimensions. Whereas the institutional dimension is concerned with the allocation of authority between layers of go...

Working within the theoretical framework set by the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) literature, this paper clarifies how psychological factors (emotions, attitudes, beliefs, and information-seeking) affect skill development in the context of smart farming technologies. Interviews with multiple stakeholders from the agriculture sectors of three Eu...

This paper aims to understand the different resilience pathways local governments may take during moments of crisis, specifically focusing on the Covid-19 pandemic. Through survey responses from local administrations in Wallonia, Belgium, we consider how varied contexts led to different strategic resilience pathways. These pathways range from stati...

This article investigates how policy narratives developed by proponents and opponents of infrastructure megaprojects generate controversies that affect the megaproject implementation. Drawing evidence from the Lyon-Turin high-speed railway, we argue that megaproject implementation is a complex public management endeavour which can hardly be conside...

Smart city initiatives are increasingly dominating urban policy scripts worldwide, and their diffusion is centered upon different regional strategies. Adopting the Narrative Policy Framework as methodological basis, this article examines the smart city strategies developed by the Wallonia and Brussels-capital regions during the 2014–2019 period. Mo...

We respond to the call for more research on the institutional forces that shape global megaprojects. We therefore address megaprojects as elaborate, temporally bracketed social systems made up of key actor groups pursuing interwoven individual and joint goals that may not always be aligned. This work illustrates the process by which goal-oriented a...

An overly favorable narrative has developed around the role played by digital technologies in containing Covid-19, which oversimplifies the complexity of technology adoption. This narrative takes sociomaterial arrangements for granted and conceptualizes technology affordance - the problem-solving capability of a technology - as a standard built-in...

In this position paper, we explore the adoption of a Smart City with a socio-technical perspective. A Smart city is a transformational technological process leading to profound modifications of existing urban regimes and infrastructure components. In this study, we consider a Smart City as a socio-technical system where the interplay between techno...

In this position paper, we explore the adoption of a Smart City with a socio-technical perspective. A Smart city is a transformational technological process leading to profound modifications of existing urban regimes and infrastructure components. In this study, we consider a Smart City as a socio-technical system where the interplay between techno...

Depuis quelques mois, les différents gouvernements, en Belgique ou ailleurs, ont dû prendre des mesures afin de lutter contre la crise sanitaire provoquée par la Covid-19. Ces mesures ont impacté le mode de fonctionnement des villes et communes qui ont dû s’adapter. Au Smart City Institute, en cette période complexe, la combinaison des concepts de...

This paper uses sociomateriality as a theoretical lens to examine how sociomaterial arrengements have moderated the effectiveness of the technological solutions adopted by public authorities to control the Covid-19 pandemic. The examination is based on a two-stage text data mining analysis of 2,187 Covid-19 documents. Clustering of co-occurrence da...

Over the last decades, the rail sector has seen considerable reform in the European Union (EU). The overreaching goal has been to revitalise this sector and to make it more competitive to attract traffic from firms operating in other transport markets. By retrieving information from the OECD’s ETCR database, this paper focuses on the rail freight s...

This paper explores the role of policy narratives in the implementation of global megaprojects. By focusing on the Lyon-Turin high-speed railway-promoted by the European Union and the French and Italian governments as a part of the trans-European transport infrastructure policy-we investigate how narratives developed by proponents and opponents of...

This study takes a deep look into 7 selected European Neighbourhood Instrument South Partner Countries (ENI SPCs) labour market and migration issues, as well as the policy mechanisms designed to solve job and skill mismatching problems in the Mediterranean. It consists of two parts. Part 1 provides an analysis of the macro-economic, demographic, ed...

Over the last decades, the rail sector has seen considerable reform in the European Union (EU). The overreaching goal has been to revitalise this sector and to make it more competitive to attract traffic from firms operating in other transport markets. By retrieving information from the OECD’s ETCR database, this paper focuses on the rail freight s...

Over the last five decades, European public sectors have undergone a profound process of organizational change, where managerial tools and principles from the private sector have permeated through governments and administrations of many countries. New Public Management (NPM) reform ideas were crucial to this change. Mainstream studies on NPM reform...

Network services such as electricity, natural gas, telecommunications, transport and water are crucial factors of economic well-being as they offer society the opportunity to coordinate, over time and space, large and complex flows of essential goods, people or services. Until the 1980s, these services in Europe were mainly provided by vertically i...

During the past 50 years, European public sectors have undergone a profound process of organizational change, where managerial tools and principles from the private sector have permeated through governments and administrations of many countries. A substantial amount of academic literature has now been devoted to public management reforms. Many scho...

Framed within the paradigm of New Public Management (NPM), structural reforms in the EU aimed at modernizing the public administrations of Member States (MSs) have long since been a priority area of the EU's economic policy. Since the 1990s, these reforms have been sharply intensified across European countries with the declared purpose of enhancing...