Modernization has been a process of urbanization and it also has been a process of concentrating various resources in order to improve production efficiency and achieve economic development. Expanded metropolitan areas today account for 80% of world economic activities (World Bank, 2023) and are expected to hold 70% of the total population by 2050 (UN, 2019). Efficiency through concentration, however, is vulnerable to various types of disasters and the concentration of population and wealth makes the damage even more serious in case of disasters. This phenomenon was already well-known through natural disasters; however, the recent COVID-19 pandemic made the world realize this double-edged characteristic of metropolis (Kudo, 2021).

Thus, Smart City initiatives aiming resilience and agility have recently become the major trend among Smart City projects (Vermiglio et al., 2020). These initiatives require consensus building among stakeholders prior to the project and citizen participation during the experiments and implementation, especially in order to gather data from the residents and all related stakeholders. However, both consensus building and citizen participation are not always easy to achieve in real cases. Often the participation is passive and not all stakeholders are engaged during the process of consensus building. As more and more Smart City projects focus on data collection, not only the minimum legal requirement, but also political and social consensus have become important, while many cases show the difficulty in achieving consensus and make citizen participate in the process. Various Smart City cases show that the participation is often at nonparticipation level of the Arnstein's ladder of citizen participation (1969), at most information or placation level.

This research, thus, tries to understand the patterns of consensus building and participation from both literatures and cases. The paper first explores the concept of recent Smart Cities in relation to their transitions and types, then, tries to classify the patterns of consensus building and participation in Smart City initiative through literature review and cases. Around 20 Japanese and 10 international cases are classified according to the types of consensus building and participation patterns, revealing relationship among stakeholders’ readiness, local experiences, and type, size, main objectives of Smart City. The paper concludes with some practical implications for consensus building and participation in Smart City.

Our paper delves into the perceptions of the representatives of the Romanian local public institutions regarding citizen participation in the decision-making process in Romania. We conducted an online survey of all City Halls in Romania, both from urban and rural areas and all County Councils (the intermediary administrative level in Romania). We focused mainly on the administrative levels that are closest to the citizens. The survey was conducted at the end of March 2024, and until now, we collected responses from 469 institutions. The overall response rate is 14,57%, but we are still collecting responses as reminders were sent to non-responders. The goal of the survey was to map citizen participation in the decision-making process by looking at the following aspects:

1. The channels most frequently used by public institutions to communicate information to citizens;

2. The channels most frequently used by citizens to signal their problems to local public institutions;

3. The most frequently used forms of citizen participation in the decision-making process;

4. Which policy actors engage and participate in different stages of the decision-making process and the level of their involvement; and

5. The perception of the motives for citizens to resist/ oppose the decisions adopted by local authorities.

We aim to analyze how ICT-based communication channels facilitate communication between public institutions and citizens. This aspect is of utmost importance as it underscores the increasing role of technology in enhancing citizen participation. In addition, we will explore the differences in citizen participation in terms of characteristics of public institutions (size of the public institution and community, location in urban/ rural areas).

Another goal of the paper is to examine the decade-long changes regarding citizen participation in the decision-making process in Romania. We conducted a similar survey in late winter of 2009 and early spring of 2010 on a representative sample of City Halls and County Councils in Romania. At that time, we collected 381 valid questionnaires. Therefore, we aim to compare the changes in the perception of the representatives of Romanian public institutions regarding the degree of citizens’ involvement in the decision-making process. This comparison will provide valuable insights into the evolution of Romanian public administration.

The present study aims to analyze in depth the democratic innovation (DI) called collective mandate (CM) in activity at the City Council of the city of Florianópolis, capital of the State of Santa Catarina, Brazil, entitled “Mandata Bem Viver”. In a CM a legislator shares their power with a group of citizens, giving up parliamentary autonomy to foment democratic participation and accountability in the mandate. In Brazil, in recent decades, there has been a significant rise in CMs as they aim to: (I) redesign the role of elected legislators based on a depersonalized collective process with a strong connection to local social movements; (II) allow institutionalized political spaces to be occupied by actors traditionally excluded from traditional Brazilian political dynamics, indigenous peoples, lgbtqiapn+, people with disabilities, etc; (III) improve the democratic experience of its participants, of the elective mandate about traditional institutions, as well as “Mandata Bem Viver“ own relationship with civil society. Using a qualitative research approach, in-depth interviews, participant observation, and documentary analysis, to understand the potentialities and the limitations of DI, this study seeks to answer the following question: How has “Mandata Bem Viver“ contributed to democratizing the procedures of legislative representation, legislative production, citizen-state relations and public governance of Florianópolis?