Digitally Driven Urban Governance: Framework and Evaluation in China

Wei Li, Jun Zhang, Xiaojie Guo, Yang Zhou, Fan Yang and Ruilin Li ()
Additional contact information
Wei Li: School of Management, Fudan University, Shanghai 200437, China
Jun Zhang: Graduate School of Education, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian 116024, China
Xiaojie Guo: College of Foreign Languages, Hefei University of Technology, Hefei 230002, China
Yang Zhou: School of Economics and Management, Jining University, Jining 272100, China
Fan Yang: College of Foreign Languages, Hefei University of Technology, Hefei 230002, China
Ruilin Li: Graduate School of Education, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian 116024, China

Sustainability, 2024, vol. 16, issue 22, 1-22

Abstract: With the rapid development of digital technology, the role of digitalisation in urban governance continues to emerge. Building a theoretical analysis framework and evaluation system of digitally driven urban governance has important theoretical and practical significance for stimulating the efficiency of digital technology tools and improving the energy level of urban digital governance. This paper aims to explore the mechanism of urban governance enabled by digital technology, innovatively change the previous thinking mode that only attaches importance to facility construction and e-government platforms, adopt ecological thinking, and comprehensively consider the role of “soft elements” such as strategic support, industrial support, the security environment, talent support, and the market environment. Then, the extreme value variance method and the coefficient of variation method are used to calculate the overall capacity and secondary index scores of each city, and the standard deviation of secondary index scores is used to represent the sub-environmental balance of the cross-sectional data of China’s provinces. In order to further explore which indicators restrict the improvement of China’s urban digital governance capacity, this study also constructs an obstacle degree model. The results show the following: (1) The overall capability of China’s digitally driven urban governance is low, with a total score of 27.25, indicating that China’s digitally driven urban governance is in its infancy. (2) There is a significant development imbalance among Chinese provinces, with Beijing ranking first with a score of 81.16, and Tibet, Qinghai, Xinjiang, Heilongjiang, and Ningxia scoring less than 13.30 points, ranking as the bottom 5 among the 31 provinces. (3) The shortcomings of talent support, industrial support, and the security environment restrict the improvement of the entire digital ecological governance ability.

Keywords: digitalisation; urban governance; theoretical logic; evaluation system; balanced development (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/16/22/9673/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/16/22/9673/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:16:y:2024:i:22:p:9673-:d:1515321

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().