Salvador Muñoz Hermoso has had his paper “Exploring Smart Governance Challenges in Local Governments: Insights from a Delphi Study in Spain” accepted for publication in Digital Government: Research and Practice, the ACM journal devoted to digital government and public sector transformation. The manuscript was accepted as a Research Paper in its current form. The work is co-authored with Miguel A. Olivero, Francisco J. Domínguez-Mayo, and David Benavides.
The paper is a result of the doctoral research that Salvador carried out at the University of Seville, where his industrial doctorate focused on e-collaboration and smart governance. He defended his thesis in September 2025. Throughout that research he combined academic work with more than two decades of professional experience in the development and management of electronic administration and local government projects, a background that shapes the questions the paper sets out to answer.
The study applies the Delphi method to gather and structure expert consensus on the challenges that Spanish local governments face when moving towards smart governance models. By engaging practitioners and specialists across municipalities in successive rounds, the work produces an empirically grounded picture of the needs, barriers, and enabling conditions behind smart governance adoption at the local level. This qualitative validation was a key step in the research roadmap of the thesis, complementing the conceptual work developed in earlier stages.
Research on public administration only becomes useful when it listens closely to the people who run these systems every day, and a Delphi study is designed to do exactly that. The acceptance in an ACM journal confirms the relevance of that approach.
Congratulations to Salvador, Miguel A. Olivero, Francisco J. Domínguez-Mayo, and David Benavides.
Further details, including the DOI and open access availability, will be published once the article appears in the journal.