Public Involvement in Taking Legislative Action as to the Spatial Development of the Tourist Sector in Greece - The "OpenGov" Platform Experience

By the Aarhus Convention (1998) it is recognized the right of citizens to get access to and influence decision-making in respect to issues affecting the state of the environment. More specifically, in Article 8 it is stated that public authorities are forced to engage public participation when preparing regulations or legally binding rules that have a significant environmental impact. Towards this end, Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) and their applications have considerably expanded the potential of planners and decision makers to interact with stakeholders and the public and engage them in participatory processes through ICTs-enabled platforms. The focus of the present paper is on the context of public consultation in taking legislative action as to the spatial development of the tourist sector in Greece. It consists of three parts: the first part, where the context of engaging the public in governmental decision-making in Greece is discussed, following the Open Government Partnership (OGP) initiative; the second part, presenting the steps of the “OpenGov” online platform, designed for gathering public knowledge to further improve legislative efforts and policy; and the third part, elaborating on the experience gained by the use of the “OpenGov” platform for decision-making on the spatial development of the tourist sector in Greece.

[1]  Trevor L. Brown,et al.  The Importance of Contract Design , 2012 .

[2]  Dharam P. Ghai,et al.  Grassroots Environmental Action: People's Participation in Sustainable Development , 1992 .

[3]  J. Cameron,et al.  Transforming communities: Towards a research agenda , 2001 .

[4]  Abigail Green,et al.  A typology of stakeholder participation for company environmental decision‐making , 2003 .

[5]  Ivan Koprić,et al.  Citizens as Partners: Information, Consultation and Public Participation in Policy-Making , 2006 .

[6]  Anastasia Stratigea,et al.  ICTs for rural development: potential applications and barriers involved , 2011 .

[7]  I. Turton,et al.  Public Participation, GIS, and Cyberdemocracy: Evaluating on-Line Spatial Decision Support Systems , 2001 .

[8]  Catherine Macombe,et al.  Participatory methods, guidelines and good practice guidance to be applied throughout the project to enhance problem definition, co-learning, synthesis and dissemination , 2005 .

[9]  Samuel Paul,et al.  Community Participation in Development Projects: The World Bank Experience , 1987 .

[10]  R. Kingston.  Public Participation in Local Policy Decision-making: The Role of Web-based Mapping , 2007 .

[11]  A. Manoharan.  A Study of the Determinants of County E-Government in the United States , 2013 .

[12]  A. Hasan,et al.  Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development , 2007 .

[13]  Taewoo Nam,et al.  Government 2.0 Collects the Wisdom of Crowds , 2011, SocInfo.

[14]  Stephen Bass,et al.  PARTICIPATION IN STRATEGIES FOR SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT , 1995 .

[15]  Igor Bizjak,et al.  Improving public participation in spatial planning with Web 2.0 tools , 2012 .

[16]  Seongcheol Kim,et al.  An institutional analysis of an e-government system for anti-corruption: The case of OPEN , 2009, Gov. Inf. Q..

[17]  John Domingue,et al.  The Future of the Internet , 1999, Academia Letters.

[18]  Kenneth L. Kraemer,et al.  Computing and public organizations , 1997 .

[19]  E. Mostert.  The challenge of public participation , 2003 .

[20]  Jennifer Bussell.  Why Get Technical? Corruption and the Politics of Public Service Reform in the Indian States , 2010 .

[21]  A. Stratigea,et al.  Experiential marketing and local tourist development: a policy perspective , 2011 .

[22]  P. Egger,et al.  Local resource management and development: strategic dimensions of peoples participation. , 1992 .

[23]  M. Jae Moon,et al.  The Evolution of Internal IT Applications and e-Government Studies in Public Administration , 2014 .

[24]  Have Participatory Approaches Increased Capabilities , 2005 .

[25]  A. Stratigea.  The concept of ‘smart cities’. Towards community development? , 2012, NetCoM 2012.

[26]  Daren C. Brabham.  Crowdsourcing the Public Participation Process for Planning Projects , 2009 .

[27]  Ângela Guimarães Pereira,et al.  From Technocratic to Participatory Decision Support Systems: Responding to the New Governance Initiatives , 2002 .

[28]  Lawrence Susskind,et al.  Mediated Negotiation in the Public Sector: The Planner as Mediator , 1984 .

[29]  Jooho Lee,et al.  E‐Participation, Transparency, and Trust in Local Government , 2012 .

[30]  Anastasia Stratigea,et al.  Tools and Technologies for Planning the Development of Smart Cities , 2015 .

[32]  Ortwin Renn,et al.  Public participation in decision making: A three-step procedure , 1993, Policy Sciences.

[33]  Pulugurtha Sravya Sindhuri,et al.  Access to Justice in Environmental Matters , 2014 .