The Public Value Sphere Within the Participatory Budgeting: Evidences From an Italian Smart City

Literature on participatory budgeting has focused on the antecedents, the contents and the obstacles, considering more the point of view of public officials and managers than that of the citizens. The present study aims to deepen the knowledge on the participatory budgeting, exploring the perspective of the community in order to verify its potentials as a form of participatory democracy. Furthermore, the case study is an Italian smart city, where the role of digital technology in the formation of public value sphere could be surely investigated. The research findings highlighted, indeed, how the shift of the citizenship from a status to an action depends mostly on the institutional and technological infrastructures applied to the participatory budgeting. These applications enable the latter to create spaces where public officials, managers and citizens interact in order to share objectives, ideas, rules and resources within the public value creation.