The Committee Annual meeting of 2014 was centred on the “Smart Local Governance: the challenge of good governance in local administrations” and was held in Bilbao on the 6 and 7 November.

Local governments from all around the world are working to improve their efficiency and effectiveness, and therefore regain the trust of citizens in their performance.

Increasing demands of citizens, forces local government to face the unavoidable challenge of increasing our ability to provide effective solutions to collective problems and also to create and generate acceptance, complicity and closeness with citizens. It´s not an easy task, we have to adopt innovative solutions in our management processes and instruments and also in the definition of our policies.

A new organizational culture with an important relational component. To achieve this Smart Local Governance it is necessary for local administrations to face 4 key-challenges:

• Strategic local public management
• Transparency and citizen participation
• City intelligence: Big data + open data
• Modernization of Public Administration and Online Public Services

And these were the issues we discussed and exchanged along the two days of meeting.

The working meeting was organized in collaboration with UN-HABITAT, the Committee on Decentralization and Local Self Government, the LSE Cities Program and EUDEL (Basque Association of Municipalities) and was attended by more than 80 representatives coming from the Basque Country and Spain but also from other countries such as Ecuador, Germany, Norway, Finnland, Mozambique, Kenya, South Korea, United States, England, Latvia, Mexico among others.

During two days, experts from international organizations and academic world such as the Norwegian Nord-Trøndelag University College (HiNT), the George Washington University, the European Institute of Public Administration, Transparency International, the OECD and Microsoft among others, shared their vision regarding the governance challenges.

The meeting also enabled participants to learn about the experiences carried out by cities such as Bilbao, Mannheim, Sant Cugat del Vallès, Tampere, Barcelona, the Provincial Government of Barcelona and also form Associations and Networks of Cities and Municipalities such as EUDEL, Association of Municipalities of Ecuador and Citynet.
Presentations: Link

Report: Spanish / English

Photos:  Link

Programe: Spanish / English