engleski

E-Participation Tools Used by City Governments in Croatia

This exploratory study analyses the supply side of e-participation, i.e. the use of e- participation tools by city governments in Croatia, based on data collected from the cities’ websites and other available platforms. The rationale for the study stems from the recent developments in the availability of public e-services and smart city concepts gaining momentum, consequently pushing government officials into accepting more transparent and collaborative ways of operating with citizens, local businesses and organisations. The results show that the city governments in Croatia use social media channels (mostly Facebook) to communicate with their stakeholders. In contrast, e-participation platforms and more collaborative tools (such as chat rooms, discussion forums, decision-making games, and e- voting) are not used, and citizens are consequently only digitally informed, but not given a real opportunity to influence the decision-making processes. That level of genuine public engagement characterises smart city environments where the ultimate goal of a smart city initiative should be to facilitate the collaboration between citizens, businesses and NGOs with the local government. Therefore, the second aim of the paper was to investigate if there were differences between the portfolio of e-participation tools in smart cities compared to cities that do not have a smart city strategy in place. Although the results are in favour of smart cities, due to a low number of cities reviewed (20 altogether), this difference is not statistically significant.

e-participation ; e-tools ; Croatia ; smart cities

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