Giovanni Esposito | University of Liege (original) (raw)
Uploads
Papers by Giovanni Esposito
Cities, Nov 1, 2021
Smart city initiatives are increasingly dominating urban policy scripts worldwide, and their diff... more 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. Moving away from corporate-led deterministic models of smart city development, it shows that there is no onesize-fit-all approach to smart urbanism. Regional governments attribute different meanings to urban innovation and formulate place-based strategies of smart city development in relation to their socioeconomic contexts, seeking to advance technological solutions to what they perceive as the most pressing problems of their territories and populaces.
International Review of Administrative Sciences
This article adopts an interpretive approach to investigate how local policy-makers portray and j... more 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 in 2019 by the Walloon Region. We use Boltanski and Thévenot’s theory of orders of worth and combine quantitative and qualitative content analysis to categorize the different justifications elaborated by municipal governments. The empirical results point to the polysemic nature of the smart city concept and highlight the diversity of opportunities offered by smart city policies according to municipal policy-makers. Overall, our study contributes to the understanding of the varieties of interpretations underpinning the construction of digital governance initiatives. It therefore supports the argument according to which there is no one-size-...
Policy and Society
Megaprojects are increasingly common across countries and attract substantial political attention... more 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 governance is often proposed as a valuable resource in this regard. In this paper, we investigate the setting and design of two participatory venues operating in the context of the implementation of the Lyon-Turin high-speed railway megaproject: the Italian Observatory for the Turin-Lyon Railway and the French Public Inquiry. Empirical evidence shows that the Italian case featured substantial structural barriers to effective democratic participation. As for the French case, while better designed and implanted in its context, it featured important agentic limitations that undermined its democratic potential. On the basis of our case study, we the...
Cities, 2021
Smart city initiatives are increasingly dominating urban policy scripts worldwide, and their diff... more 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. Moving away from corporate-led deterministic models of smart city development, it shows that there is no one-size-fit-all approach to smart urbanism. Regional governments attribute different meanings to urban innovation and formulate place-based strategies of smart city development in relation to their socioeconomic contexts, seeking to advance technological solutions to what they perceive as the most pressing problems of their territories and populaces.
A march toward deeper democratic decision-making procedures cannot be combined with the current E... more A march toward deeper democratic decision-making procedures cannot be combined with the current European strategy, because the EU is not conceived to be a democratic authority, but rather a supranational normative authority whose purpose is to achieve the objectives defined in the treaties and mainly, in accordance with the Monnet method, European integration through the establishment of a single market based on the perfect competition model. In this view, the so called democratic deficit is not an occasional dysfunction of the EU decision-making process, but rather a crucial prerequisite to implement credible commitment for market preservation.For these reasons we argue that democratic legitimacy and economic efficiency are decoupled in the EU integration strategy. It emerges from the existing discrepancy between the treaty’s formulations and the decisional practice of institutions, that democratic and economic goals are separately pursued
Public Management Review, 2020
This article investigates how policy narratives developed by proponents and opponents of infrastr... more 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 considered a rational, straightforward process. It is rather a nonlinear process involving stakeholders with divergent interests and logics of action engaging in a battle over competing narratives to influence implementation outcomes. Institutional settings opened to opponents' voice in megaproject decisionmaking facilitate and streamline the resolution of controversies, whereas difficult and conflictual conditions emerge in the opposite case.
International Journal of Project Management, 2021
We respond to the call for more research on the institutional forces that shape global megaprojec... more 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 actors, in this case international organizations, national governments, firms, and civil society, work through formal administrative structures and legal systems to create and transform their institutional contexts. Building from the findings of an extended case study of the Lyon-Turin high-speed railway megaproject, we firstly detail the overarching institutional environment that megaproject professionals build to realize success. Secondly, we categorize the variety of institutional practices that actors can use to shape global megaprojects. Thirdly, we describe the institutional shaping skills available to project managers for such cases. These findings broaden the scope of traditional project management approaches to megaprojects and provide rich detail in relation to the understanding and successful governance of megaprojects.
Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, 2020
Over the last decades, the rail sector has seen considerable reform in the European Union (EU). T... more 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 service market and answers the following research question: have liberalisation reform policies increased the market share of rail freight services in the EU? By contributing to the existing literature on the empirical assessment of liberalisation policies in the EU, our findings indicate a positive impact of liberalisation on the market shares of rail freight services. Nevertheless, the paper suggests that merely relying on these policies to sustain the economic growth of rail-freight firms might not suffice alone and that might be important to combine them with other policy solutions such as more environmental-friendly regulations.
Annals of Public and Cooperative Economics, 2017
Framed within the paradigm of New Public Management (NPM), structural reforms in the EU aimed at ... more 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 economy, efficiency and effectiveness in their national public sectors’ organizations. In line with the European Commission's recent research initiatives in search for novel quantitative data on NPM in the EU, this paper studies European parties’ NPM reform rhetoric. More specifically, it investigates the MSs’ institutional, economic and political context within which parties have declared their intention of reforming national administrative systems. Thus, it sheds light on the MSs’ domestic factors that are associated with the diffusion of the NPM values across the political discourse of EU's national parties.
Politics, 2018
During the past 50 years, European public sectors have undergone a profound process of organizati... more 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 scholars have associated them with the diffusion of a managerialist ideology. However, the relationship between public management reforms, political ideology, and public expressions of support for these reforms by political parties has been a relatively under-explored topic within the literature and is the gap we address in this article. Using a longitudinal framework of study, our analysis shows how issues surrounding managerialist reforms have evolved across the electoral manifestos of European parties during the past 50 years. Our findings reveal that these reforms have enjoyed a growing political profile over time in many countries within Western and Eastern Europe. Furthermore, we also examine and discuss the differences and similarities of these reforms across countries.
Cities, Nov 1, 2021
Smart city initiatives are increasingly dominating urban policy scripts worldwide, and their diff... more 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. Moving away from corporate-led deterministic models of smart city development, it shows that there is no onesize-fit-all approach to smart urbanism. Regional governments attribute different meanings to urban innovation and formulate place-based strategies of smart city development in relation to their socioeconomic contexts, seeking to advance technological solutions to what they perceive as the most pressing problems of their territories and populaces.
International Review of Administrative Sciences
This article adopts an interpretive approach to investigate how local policy-makers portray and j... more 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 in 2019 by the Walloon Region. We use Boltanski and Thévenot’s theory of orders of worth and combine quantitative and qualitative content analysis to categorize the different justifications elaborated by municipal governments. The empirical results point to the polysemic nature of the smart city concept and highlight the diversity of opportunities offered by smart city policies according to municipal policy-makers. Overall, our study contributes to the understanding of the varieties of interpretations underpinning the construction of digital governance initiatives. It therefore supports the argument according to which there is no one-size-...
Policy and Society
Megaprojects are increasingly common across countries and attract substantial political attention... more 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 governance is often proposed as a valuable resource in this regard. In this paper, we investigate the setting and design of two participatory venues operating in the context of the implementation of the Lyon-Turin high-speed railway megaproject: the Italian Observatory for the Turin-Lyon Railway and the French Public Inquiry. Empirical evidence shows that the Italian case featured substantial structural barriers to effective democratic participation. As for the French case, while better designed and implanted in its context, it featured important agentic limitations that undermined its democratic potential. On the basis of our case study, we the...
Cities, 2021
Smart city initiatives are increasingly dominating urban policy scripts worldwide, and their diff... more 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. Moving away from corporate-led deterministic models of smart city development, it shows that there is no one-size-fit-all approach to smart urbanism. Regional governments attribute different meanings to urban innovation and formulate place-based strategies of smart city development in relation to their socioeconomic contexts, seeking to advance technological solutions to what they perceive as the most pressing problems of their territories and populaces.
A march toward deeper democratic decision-making procedures cannot be combined with the current E... more A march toward deeper democratic decision-making procedures cannot be combined with the current European strategy, because the EU is not conceived to be a democratic authority, but rather a supranational normative authority whose purpose is to achieve the objectives defined in the treaties and mainly, in accordance with the Monnet method, European integration through the establishment of a single market based on the perfect competition model. In this view, the so called democratic deficit is not an occasional dysfunction of the EU decision-making process, but rather a crucial prerequisite to implement credible commitment for market preservation.For these reasons we argue that democratic legitimacy and economic efficiency are decoupled in the EU integration strategy. It emerges from the existing discrepancy between the treaty’s formulations and the decisional practice of institutions, that democratic and economic goals are separately pursued
Public Management Review, 2020
This article investigates how policy narratives developed by proponents and opponents of infrastr... more 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 considered a rational, straightforward process. It is rather a nonlinear process involving stakeholders with divergent interests and logics of action engaging in a battle over competing narratives to influence implementation outcomes. Institutional settings opened to opponents' voice in megaproject decisionmaking facilitate and streamline the resolution of controversies, whereas difficult and conflictual conditions emerge in the opposite case.
International Journal of Project Management, 2021
We respond to the call for more research on the institutional forces that shape global megaprojec... more 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 actors, in this case international organizations, national governments, firms, and civil society, work through formal administrative structures and legal systems to create and transform their institutional contexts. Building from the findings of an extended case study of the Lyon-Turin high-speed railway megaproject, we firstly detail the overarching institutional environment that megaproject professionals build to realize success. Secondly, we categorize the variety of institutional practices that actors can use to shape global megaprojects. Thirdly, we describe the institutional shaping skills available to project managers for such cases. These findings broaden the scope of traditional project management approaches to megaprojects and provide rich detail in relation to the understanding and successful governance of megaprojects.
Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, 2020
Over the last decades, the rail sector has seen considerable reform in the European Union (EU). T... more 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 service market and answers the following research question: have liberalisation reform policies increased the market share of rail freight services in the EU? By contributing to the existing literature on the empirical assessment of liberalisation policies in the EU, our findings indicate a positive impact of liberalisation on the market shares of rail freight services. Nevertheless, the paper suggests that merely relying on these policies to sustain the economic growth of rail-freight firms might not suffice alone and that might be important to combine them with other policy solutions such as more environmental-friendly regulations.
Annals of Public and Cooperative Economics, 2017
Framed within the paradigm of New Public Management (NPM), structural reforms in the EU aimed at ... more 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 economy, efficiency and effectiveness in their national public sectors’ organizations. In line with the European Commission's recent research initiatives in search for novel quantitative data on NPM in the EU, this paper studies European parties’ NPM reform rhetoric. More specifically, it investigates the MSs’ institutional, economic and political context within which parties have declared their intention of reforming national administrative systems. Thus, it sheds light on the MSs’ domestic factors that are associated with the diffusion of the NPM values across the political discourse of EU's national parties.
Politics, 2018
During the past 50 years, European public sectors have undergone a profound process of organizati... more 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 scholars have associated them with the diffusion of a managerialist ideology. However, the relationship between public management reforms, political ideology, and public expressions of support for these reforms by political parties has been a relatively under-explored topic within the literature and is the gap we address in this article. Using a longitudinal framework of study, our analysis shows how issues surrounding managerialist reforms have evolved across the electoral manifestos of European parties during the past 50 years. Our findings reveal that these reforms have enjoyed a growing political profile over time in many countries within Western and Eastern Europe. Furthermore, we also examine and discuss the differences and similarities of these reforms across countries.