CITIZEN PARTICIPATION IN INCREASINGLY DIGITALIZED GOVERNMENTAL ENVIRONMENTS – A SYSTEMATIC LITERATURE REVIEW

Citizen participation in increasingly digitalized governmental environments can introduce fruitful capabilities to encourage citizens to engage in municipal affairs and through this take actively part in fostering smart cities’ effectiveness. However, the practical exploitation of recent knowledge is still not sufficiently operationalized, whilst research in this field yields various approaches focusing on diverse emphases. Therefore, the necessity of systematically collecting and afterwards analysing the existing literature towards this topic is obvious. This paper depicts a proceeding to systematically review the available literature towards the relevant research units on citizen participation. Overall, 48 topic-based papers were identified out of leading journals and conference papers about information systems. The main findings of the relevant papers were assessed to a proposed analytical framework consisting of increasing participation stages and two distinct focus groups namely government and citizens. Accordingly, the covered recent focus areas of research are identified to reveal where state-of-the-art research falls short. Consequently, the imperative of emphasising investigation regarding concepts for ICT-enabled services focusing the empowerment of citizens arises as being our contribution for guiding future research, whilst governments can practically benefit from the composed framework by using it for classifying, planning and implementing proposed participation activities.