Citizen Participation Level in Smart Governance: A Literature Review

This literature review used and expanded Cardullo & Kitchin's (2018) “scaffold of smart citizen participation” to classify the participation level found in the smart governance literature. This review highlights the importance of the use of a common metric for measuring citizens level of participation in smart governance. The departure point of this work is the literature review developed by Tomor et al. (2019). Their review was updated and compared. We confirmed some challenges positioned by the literature on the indiscriminate use of citizen participation as both an intrinsic characteristic of governance and as an outcome of the collaboration (Meijer & Bolívar, 2015; Tomor et al., 2019). This lack of a common understanding of the level of citizen autonomy creates a confusion in the literature regarding the actual level of participation, which highlights a need for further research about citizen participation and collaboration in smart governance.