The SMART Governance discussions were held around the definition of the concept, especially related to construction logistics, and what the concept should include. The participants were representatives from municipalities, governments, academia and industry in different parts of the world, from Colombia to Norway.
SMART governance concept
Some of the conclusions that the discussions led to, were that SMART Governance should focus on collaboration between stakeholders and have a process for inclusion of different perspectives in order to be an arena where stakeholders can meet each other. The concept should provide rules to follow and enable knowledge sharing between professionals and projects.
All workshop participants agreed on that the concept should be administrated by a neutral and independent organization that could manage a learning cycle between uses. In many cases this might be the municipality who often also is the one ordering large construction work and therefore bares the main costs.
Multi-actor multi-criteria analysis (MAMCA)
The MAMCA discussion focused on the role of the MAMCA methodology in SMART Governance, how to use it and when to use it. Some of the general conclusions from the discussions were that integrating the MAMCA into a SMART Governance concept aims to improve decision making and to enable better and more broadly supported implementation of solutions.
The usage of the MAMCA tool also allows the concerns of more vulnerable stakeholders to be considered and it seems to add the most value when it is applied from the start of the project, instead of somewhere in the middle, in order to avoid complaints further on in the project.
The workshop showed the importance of the research topics in CIVIC, but also their complexity. Moreover, it revealed the interests from different actors and stakeholders that are involved in, and affected by construction in urban areas.