Resumo

Smart city model was implanting in different cities around the world and implies a huge amount of investments in infrastructure. For instance, Songdo in South Korea cost around 40 billions of dollars. These great investments in smart cities were explained by expectations about benefits of smart cities for different stakeholders.

However, smart city model has been criticized in academic works and specialized media because it could not provide until this time that smart city model is benefit for stakeholders. In this context is important to understand expectations and utility functions for each primary stakeholder involved in smart city context (Government Agencies, Business and Citizens). Is it possible to measure value created for stakeholder of smart cities? Stakeholders received different levels of value?

Meijer and Bolivar (2015) argues it is necessary to develop new studies of the impact of smart cities in economic growth and other public values. Several authors proposed general frameworks to evaluate smart cities implementation. However, this approaches are based on criteria that not include stakeholders in details. Also, we tested a theoretical proposition from Donaldson and Preston (1995) about normative approach in stakeholder theory applied in public administration context.

We have developed a quantitative study using a database composed for 68 medium-sized smart cities from Europe, provided by European Smart Cities project. We use 17 (seventeen) indicators to characterize each stakeholder. To test the hypothesis that a city hall’s level of attention is different across stakeholder groups, we use the ANOVA test to analyze different treatment among smart city stakeholders.

The conducted ANOVA test indicated that there was no statistically significant difference between business index, government agencies index and citizens index (F = 0,141, df = 2 and p > .05). The hypothesis is not supported by the data, in other words, a city hall’s level of attention to stakeholders is equal across stakeholder groups.

This study provided evidences of equal treatment among the smart cities' stakeholders, using as criteria the utility functions of each stakeholder described in the literature. Then, a contribution of the study is related to the confirmation of a hypothesis of equal treatment in the context of public administration, specifically in smart cities. Even though the results are not statistically significant, is contrary to the expectations of the literature on smart cities, since several authors have criticized the unequal treatment of stakeholders in smart cities.

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