Abstract

The concept of a smart city holds a great promise for prosperity for its residents by delivering them public value that satisfies their needs. But the reality falls far from the vision, as the implementation of ambitious goals in the form of smart city projects in subcontracting mode occurs in complicated socio-techno-political settings, which often end up in failure. Institutional facets of political commitment and its impact on public value creation are not fully recognized. To close this gap, this study adopts the approach of political commitment to identify and analyze those elements that could hinder the provision of public value in a smart city project. To do so, we perform a qualitative analysis of four smart city initiatives' failures in different countries. The findings reveal that particular elements associated with political commitment in subcontracting projects impact public value provision in smart city initiatives. Particularly, the key role of the continuation of political commitment in its institutionalization phase leads to a loss of public value within strategic, political, and financial spheres. Our study contributes to better recognition of institutional settings that contribute to smart city initiatives' failure.