This paper develops a framework for facilitating organizational learning through social media text analytics to enhance citizen-centric public service quality. Theoretically, the framework integrates ...double-loop learning theory with extant models of e-participation in government. Empirically, the framework is applied to a case study of citizen-to-government online interactions on a local government's department Facebook page. Our findings indicate that the missed double-loop learning opportunity resulted from two factors. First, Facebook government-posts were primarily used to advocate the government agenda by educating citizens to change their recycling behaviors without efforts to learn citizens' needs/questions. Second, this single-loop learning orientation sustained the single-loop learning nature of Facebook citizens' posts, precluding their direct and meaningful participation in the city's recycling governance. New insights generated from the case study suggest the framework's usefulness in showing more promising directions for government's double-loop learning through social media platforms to enhance public service quality.
Pushing the City Limits Einstein, Katherine Levine; Kogan, Vladimir
Urban affairs review (Thousand Oaks, Calif.),
01/2016, Volume:
52, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Are city governments capable of responding to the preferences of their constituents? Is the menu of policy options determined by forces beyond their direct control? We answer these questions using a ...comprehensive cross-sectional database linking voter preferences to local policy outcomes in more than 2,000 midsize cities and a new panel covering cities in two states. Overall, our analysis paints an encouraging picture of democracy in the city: we document substantial variation in local fiscal policy outcomes and provide evidence that voter preferences help explain why cities adopt different policies. As they become more Democratic, cities increase their spending across a number of service areas. In addition, voter sentiment shapes the other side of the ledger, determining the level and precise mix of revenues on which cities rely. In short, we show that cities respond both to competitive pressures and the needs and wants of their constituents.
•This paper analyzes the impact of digital finance on green technology innovation.•Digital finance significantly promotes green technology innovation.•Manufacturing and non-state economic development ...help to better exploit the green technology innovation effect of digital finance.•As the level of environmental decentralization increases, digital finance strongly promotes green technology innovation.
Financial development is an important driving force for promoting green technology innovation. However, traditional finance faces obstacles in supporting these innovations, and it is unclear how this dilemma can be solved. This paper seeks new solutions using digital finance to solve this dilemma. Using panel data on listed companies and cities in China, this paper analyzes the impact of digital finance on green technology innovation. The results show that (1) digital finance significantly promotes green technology innovation, and this finding holds even through serial robustness tests. The promotion effects are attributed to a reduction in corporate financing constraints, industrial structure upgrading and manufacturing development. (2) Digital financial development has a greater positive effect on green technology innovation in small-scale enterprises. Digital financial development can better promote green technology innovation in regions with higher pollutant emission intensity and where local government has stronger governance capacity. In addition, manufacturing and nonstate economic development help to better exploit the green technology innovation effect of digital finance. (3) With the improvement of environmental decentralization, digital finance strongly promotes green technology innovation, indicating that the downward trend of environmental responsibility will better alleviate the mismatch between the supply and demand of green innovation investments. In order to strengthen enterprises' green technology innovation capacity and solve serious environmental pollution problems, it is suggested that traditional financial institutions should actively embrace this digital trend. Meanwhile, government should develop differentiated innovation incentive policies to increase the technological innovation investment of manufacturing and private enterprises while also promoting the reform of the environmental decentralization system and strengthening supervision of central environmental protections.
Equity is a central value for public administration as a field and for the advancement of sustainability, yet it is disproportionately and significantly underrepresented and underprioritized in U.S. ...local governments' sustainability priorities. Equity is referred to as one of the three essential “Es” in sustainability along with environment and economy. Since the first Minnowbrook Conference held in 1968, advancing social equity has become one of the chief goals of public administration as equity emerged as one of the discipline's four “Es” along with economy, efficiency, and effectiveness. In light of this, to what extent are public administrators' concerns and efforts impactful in embracing and advancing social equity in sustainable development? With ICMA's 2015 Local Government Sustainability Practices Survey, this paper offers a unique understanding of localities' tiered realization of sustainability priorities as well as factors correlated with ascending upwards through the tiered pathway of prioritizing sustainability orientation.
This paper argues that infrastructure-led development constitutes an emergent international development regime whose imperative is to 'get the territory right'. Spatial planning strategies from the ...post-war era are increasingly employed in contemporary attempts to integrate territory with global networks of production and trade. Large-scale infrastructure projects link resource frontiers and subnational urban systems - oftentimes across national borders - in ways that constitute spatially articulated value chains geared toward the extraction of resources, logistical integration and industrial production. The paper charts the emergence of this regime, analyses its spatial manifestations and evaluates its developmental outcomes.
Since 2000, many countries have achieved considerable success in improving child survival, but localized progress remains unclear. To inform efforts towards United Nations Sustainable Development ...Goal 3.2-to end preventable child deaths by 2030-we need consistently estimated data at the subnational level regarding child mortality rates and trends. Here we quantified, for the period 2000-2017, the subnational variation in mortality rates and number of deaths of neonates, infants and children under 5 years of age within 99 low- and middle-income countries using a geostatistical survival model. We estimated that 32% of children under 5 in these countries lived in districts that had attained rates of 25 or fewer child deaths per 1,000 live births by 2017, and that 58% of child deaths between 2000 and 2017 in these countries could have been averted in the absence of geographical inequality. This study enables the identification of high-mortality clusters, patterns of progress and geographical inequalities to inform appropriate investments and implementations that will help to improve the health of all populations.
The present study sheds light on the under-researched relationship between social media content and citizens' engagement, as well as the impact of dialogic communication on citizens' engagement. To ...this end, Facebook content of the five largest Greek municipalities was examined. A six-dimensional typology of social media content posted by local governments on Facebook was proposed. The results suggest that dialogic posts and posts that trigger offline participatory activities exerted significant influence on all forms of citizens' online engagement. It is recommended that social media managers of local governments in Greece, as well as other countries with similar public administration styles and social media usage patterns, create dialogic loops with their citizenry by addressing users' questions and concerns through Facebook posts. Moreover, they could publish rich media content on Facebook in the form of videos and posts that mobilise citizens to participate in various offline activities (e.g., events, council meetings).
Land use/cover change is an important theme on the impacts of human activities on the earth systems and global environmental change. National land-use changes of China during 2010–2015 were acquired ...by the digital interpretation method using the high-resolution remotely sensed images, e.g. the Landsat 8 OLI, GF-2 remote sensing images. The spatiotemporal characteristics of land-use changes across China during 2010–2015 were revealed by the indexes of dynamic degree model, annual land-use changes ratio etc. The results indicated that the built-up land increased by 24.6×10
3
km
2
while the cropland decreased by 4.9×10
3
km
2
, and the total area of woodland and grassland decreased by 16.4×10
3
km
2
. The spatial pattern of land-use changes in China during 2010–2015 was concordant with that of the period 2000–2010. Specially, new characteristics of land-use changes emerged in different regions of China in 2010–2015. The built-up land in eastern China expanded continually, and the total area of cropland decreased, both at decreasing rates. The rates of built-up land expansion and cropland shrinkage were accelerated in central China. The rates of built-up land expansion and cropland growth increased in western China, while the decreasing rate of woodland and grassland accelerated. In northeastern China, built-up land expansion slowed continually, and cropland area increased slightly accompanied by the conversions between paddy land and dry land. Besides, woodland and grassland area decreased in northeastern China. The characteristics of land-use changes in eastern China were essentially consistent with the spatial govern and control requirements of the optimal development zones and key development zones according to the Major Function-oriented Zones Planning implemented during the 12th Five-Year Plan (2011–2015). It was a serious challenge for the central government of China to effectively protect the reasonable layout of land use types dominated with the key ecological function zones and agricultural production zones in central and western China. Furthermore, the local governments should take effective measures to strengthen the management of territorial development in future.
This article presents an explorative case study to understand the drivers and barriers that influence the adoption of smartphone-based city management apps as e-governance tools in U.S. cities. Using ...interviews with government officials and citizen focus groups in a southeastern city, we systematically examine the facilitators and barriers from the perspectives of the government and citizens. Our findings suggest that the city management app system was primarily adopted by the government to improve service efficiency through information integration and workflow automation on the backend. It is viewed by both the government and citizens as an innovative two-way communication tool that encourages citizens to report service problems and facilitates service improvement. However, the app's potential of being an open dialogic and social space to engage citizens in a full range of co-production activities has not yet been sufficiently realized. Strategies for local governments and city management app developers to address e-governance challenges are discussed.
Research has demonstrated that certain drivers increase the probability of performance data use in local government. One performance driver that has received minimal attention is where the ...performance function is organizationally located, even though prior research has shown that the organizational placement of the performance function can potentially influence the design and use of performance measurement systems. Our study explores how the organizational placement of the performance function in local government influences key drivers of performance data use. We find evidence that performance functions located outside the budget office are more likely to promote the drivers of measurement system maturity, other management processes, and devolved decision‐making, which in turn increases the probability that local officials engage in performance data use. We also identify several research implications to advance the study and practice of performance management in local government and conclude with research limitations and suggestions for future research opportunities.
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