Citizenship and local development for the participation and digital governance of public administration : Innovative experiences in Southern EU Member States

Abstract

Cyberspace has introduced new habits and relationships into traditional forms of social intercourse and modern symbolic practices and representations. The formation of a new telepolis constitutes the main challenge to be overcome by communication researchers. The breaking up of the internal and external boundaries of cities and territories, and the merging together and confusion of public and private spaces, which have always been traditionally separated in modern political discourse and communication, indicates not only new cultural trends in human organization and socialization, but also, through the various electronic forms of interaction and information exchange, the constitution of a new space for political identity and participation. Therefore, the dynamics of capitalist globalization have contributed to the creation of an urban spatiality depending on networks that have no defined territory, borders, or territorial locations with an intense concentration of resources. These dynamics, in fact, are not totally new. The difference today is, without doubt, the intensity, complexity and global reach of these networks, as well as their use and ownership by local governments, social movements and active citizenship. As a result, in the current process of capitalist globalization, the new configurations generated in the economic and technological sphere affect the political level and the issue of governance. In this context, information and communication technologies are presented as little explored tools of governance, and economic and cultural development, for the construction of new models of partnership and participatory citizenship. Concepts like digital governance refer to new ways of interaction between citizens and governments, and new concepts of urban policy using electronic means. As the main future challen ge for the social and economic development of the common space of the European Union, this is how the European Commission identifies the articulation of participation based local politics geared to a new governance that has a favourabl e impacton communitarian development processes, from a firm standpoint of participatory and plural democracy in the cultural era, as a resource that anticipates innovative ways of citizenship. The general aim is to study how these new cultural practices are materializing and the local development processes that define the current rationales of public space construction through new information and communication technologies. In this artcle, several innovative experiences in Southern EU Member States are analyzed, presenting the preliminary discussion about the conceptual basis of a new strategic vision for social movements that tries to explore new local forms of cultural autonomy for citizens through the appropriation of new information technologies, in a social research applied to ICTs and citizen participation. This study points to a more efficient use of this potential by social movements versus its underutilization by local administrations and third sector organizations.