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Purpose
This paper is framed under the relevance of collaborative governance models in smart cities that are members of the EUROCITIES network and are involved in a working group about "creative citizenship" and seeks to analyse the use of new technologies by city governments in smart cities with the aim at improving e-participation of the citizenry in the public arena. The paper aims to discuss these issues.


Design/methodology/approach
This research is based on two data collection methods. First, this paper performs an e-survey sent to leading European smart cities about the relevance of collaborative governance in strategies of cities, about the main pillars and outcomes of smart governance and about the model of participation in developing a smart city. Second, an examination of 47 local governments of smart cities included in the working group of "creative citizenship" in the EUROCITIES network is performed during March 2017 with the specific purpose of collecting data about smart technologies used for e-participation.


Findings
Sample smart cities believe that collaborative governance is necessary to be implemented in public sector management under the smart environment but less than 50 per cent of them have created citizen participation platforms to promote citizen involvement in public affairs and only a few of them promote online public consultations, discussions and petitions. Also, there are differences in perceptions and in e-participation tools used by sample smart cities in accordance with the administrative culture of the country in which these cities are located.


Originality/value
This paper contributes to fill the gap in the analysis of the relevance of collaborative governance models in smart cities and the use in these cities of transparency websites, open data projects or e-participation platforms to promote citizen involvement in the public affairs of the city.

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, smart people or smart collaboration as the defining features of smart cities, (2) a transformative or incremental perspective on changes in urban governance, (3) better outcomes or a more open process as the legitimacy claim for smart city governance. We argue for a comprehensive perspective: smart city governance is about crafting new forms of human collaboration through the use of ICTs to obtain better outcomes and more open governance processes. Research into smart city governance could benefit from previous studies into success and failure factors for e-government and build upon sophisticated theories of socio-technical change. This article highlights that smart city governance is not a technological issue: we should study smart city governance as a complex process of institutional change and acknowledge the political nature of appealing visions of socio-technical governance. Points for practitioners The study provides practitioners with an in-depth understanding of current debates about smart city governance. The article highlights that governing a smart city is about crafting new forms of human collaboration through the use of information and communication technologies. City managers should realize that technology by itself will not make a city smarter: building a smart city requires a political understanding of technology, a process approach to manage the emerging smart city and a focus on both economic gains and other public values.

The growing participation in social networking sites is altering the nature of social relations and changing the nature of political and public dialogue. This paper aims to contribute to the current debate on Web 2.0 technologies and their implications for local governance, through the identification of the perceptions of policy makers in local governments on the use of Web 2.0 in providing public services (reasons, advantages and risks) and on the change of the roles that these technologies could provoke in interactions between local governments and their stakeholders (governance models). This paper also analyzes whether the municipal size is a main factor that could influence on the policy makers' perceptions regarding these main topics. Findings suggest that policy makers are willing to implement Web 2.0 technologies in providing public services, but preferably under the Bureaucratic model framework, thus retaining a leading role in this implementation. The municipal size is a factor that could influence on policy makers' perceptions.

The way in which public sector entities disseminate information publicly is affected by the degree of transparency adopted, and the construction and management of websites are increasingly essential elements of modern public administration. Nonetheless, differences in this process exist among governments worldwide, probably due to different contextual factors. This article examines and discusses the approach of Anglo-Saxon, South American and Continental European central governments to the use of the Web as a means of making financial disclosures. To measure the disclosure of governmental financial information on the Internet, an index has been defined, taking into consideration the data considered to be relevant for a potential user, gathering the data visiting their websites. The results show that the way different countries use the Web for financial disclosure is deeply rooted in and follows from their administrative culture. In conclusion, the Continental European and South American governments should improve their digital reporting.