| Abstract [eng] |
Nowadays national states face a lot of new global challenges. This increases the pressure on national and local authorities to find appropriate ways of managing and organizing public sector activities, to address social and economic problems quickly and effectively, and to achieve their operational objectives. In this context emerges concept of smartness. The author of the master's thesis, adapting the definitions used in academic research, provides the following definition of smartness: "It is the ability to see critical features or their system, to react quickly and ingeniously to the important factors that determine them - challenges, opportunities, trends or symptoms, using them to achieve their goals, decisions based on social responsibility." This concept of smartness is used in different combinations with various words that mean the common presence of people, activities: "state", "region", "city","society","community","economy". Although these entities are different, they can all be treated as smart social systems. According to this the object of thesis is the expression of Lithuanians municipalities as a smart social system. The objective of the work is to justify the trajectory of change in the expression of municipal potential in the creation of a smart social system. To achieve the objective, in the first part of the work, a theoretical analysis of academic literature was made. This helped to create a model of the municipality as a smart social system. Model consists of 3 fields: a smart economy, smart public governance and a smart community. There are 24 different dimensions in these fields. The work identifies the relevant quantitative and qualitative characteristics of these dimensions, and the possible direction of expression analysis. The methodological part of thesis presents a developed qualitative research strategy to reveal the current state of municipalities and the possible trajectory of change. For this purpose, a model of a change trajectory was made. Model consists of: 1. The state of municipalities as a smart social system, which is analyzed in the work through a semi-structured expert interview; 2. Trajectory: a chain of changes in municipalities as a smart social system development; 3. The state of change desired by municipalities as a smart social system, when it is foreseeable, what result is expected to be achieved by improving the smart social system and what is aimed to change by doing so. The methodology part also justifies the methods used. There was an analysis of documents related to ingenious local self-government, examples of the expression of the dimensions of successful municipalities as a smart social system, and a methodological access to the performance of semi-structured experts to clarify the expression of dimensions. The third part of the work presents the results of interviews. Results show the state of the municipalities as a smart social system. In the current situation, experts have valued the best general good, training and rapid response dimensions from smart economy field. The worst evaluated were entrepreneurship and intelligence dimensions from smart economy field, interinstitutional dimension from smart public governance field and intelligence and social responsibility from smart community field. At the end of thesis the trajectory of the change in the expression of municipalities potential as the smart social system has been presented. It was done in the context of XVIII government program and so called DNA plan of the future prepared by the Mynistry of Finance at the 10th. of June 2020 June. It was proposed to invest more in the skills of leaders in local government and the development of competences of people working in the public sector. Secondly, to improve the level of digitalization in business structures and society in general. Moreover, to strengthen the expression of the knowledge and innovation dimension at local level. Furthermore, to take sustainability into account when planning investments. Then, to promote initiatives of people to protect the environment. Finally, to keep in mind cooperation, dissemination of good examples and initiatives. |
