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This paper sheds light on what city leaders can do about climate change in the context of the complex extra-territorial challenges they face. We created an original database of those actions implemented by members of the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group and investigated which boundary organizations, objects and experiences (‘boundary cooperative arrangements’) can be triggered to undertake climate change actions by city leaders. Through a secondary qualitative analysis, we identified six main actions. The research advances knowledge on both place leadership and collaborative governance, and the findings represent a tool for better tackling the ‘wicked problem’ of climate change.

Purpose - This paper aims to understand stakeholders' sentiments with respect to company policies in the water utilities (WU) sector and to explore if and how these sentiments could be a source for organisational learning. Design/methodology/approach - This study investigates the use of social media in WUs’ and stakeholders’ reactions as a source of data for organisational learning. This paper relies on a mixed-methods approach based on sentiment analysis of Facebook (FB) pages and semi-structured interviews with sustainability managers from a sample of Italian WUs. Findings - Findings show that WUs increasingly use FB mainly to promote and disclose environmental issues and as a source of information for organisational learning. A longitudinal analysis of environmental disclosure via FB reveals a growing trend of both companies’ posts and stakeholder interactions and significant differences among organisations in their ways of using information and knowledge obtained from social media. Originality/value - Theoretically, this paper builds an original link between disclosure via social media and organisational learning processes. Empirically, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is one of the first studies to identify the quantity and quality of environmental disclosure via FB and the related stakeholders’ reactions.

This paper studies how mayors engage with citizens, public managers and politicians across the policy cycle and specifically in four local governance processes: agenda setting, decision-making, public services design and delivery. Drawing from a survey of 1,067 Italian mayors, we identify four clusters of engagement: Centralized Leadership, Semi-Inclusive Leadership, Conventional Leadership and Multi-Actor Leadership. We find that some mayors prefer to engage with politicians for issues related to public service design and delivery, rather than with public managers, and that if mayors engage citizens in local governance, this is generally done across all the stages of the policy cycle.

Responding directly to the themes of the Special Issue, this paper addresses a surprising absence to date of the voluntary sector’s important role in the constitution of place leadership. Drawing on an empirical study of locally rooted voluntary sector organisations in a district of the Midlands of England, we aim to untangle the complex relationship between leadership, place and the voluntary sector, building on recent advances in the collective and critical approaches to leadership studies. A thematic analysis of a rich qualitative dataset highlighted three core themes of the voluntary sector contribution to collective place leadership: their ability to draw on and mobilise local knowledge, their positioning in a web of dense local relationships, and the notion that their intrinsic characteristics are a key source of their distinctiveness and value to the local governance network that constitutes the district’s place leadership. In addition to contributing to a nuanced understanding of the voluntary sector’s place in both the leadership and place leadership studies corpus, our findings shed light on the multiplexity and tensions of leading in the collective, as well as the extent to which the voluntary sector is constrained by wider structures and macro-dynamics.

Purpose - This paper aims to investigate the strategic governance of the digital transformation of the accounting environment in cultural organizations, with a specific focus on practices of social responsibility and stakeholder engagement in virtual museums. Design/Methodology/Approach - By adopting a multiple case study approach, this study investigated five Italian virtual museums and their digitalization processes. Data were collected and triangulated from multiple sources, including documentary analysis and semi-structured interviews with 16 key informants. Findings - Considering the digitalization of the accounting environment as a paradigmatic change, the authors identify three key transitions for its strategic governance: from the static, technical and physical to the relational, emotional and digital; from bureaucratic managerialism to value cocreation; and from traditional CSR to integrated external engagement. Moreover, the authors found that social responsibility and stakeholder engagement practices are used in a limited way, and that the use of social media appears to be increasingly important and to be carried out through an emergent rather than a deliberate strategy. Research Limitations/Implications - The paper draws from a limited sample of case studies in one country and is based on exploratory research. This paper calls for more comparative studies using a longitudinal approach to investigate the impacts of digitalization on the accounting environment of cultural organizations. Originality/Value - This study is one of the few studies concentrating on the effects of digitalization on the accounting environment of cultural organizations.

Public management scholars have recently recognized that there is a romantic bias towards public value co-creation, with cases of public value destruction, loss and/or appropriation often being neglected. To correct this fundamental issue, this article focuses on the opportunity for a material understanding of public value co-creation processes. The authors discuss why this material understanding is critical to mitigate disvalue and to facilitate the transformation of the public sector into an arena for co-creation.

Sustainability is becoming the main character of the financial industry in Europe, especially after the Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation (SFDR) 2019/2088, which came into force on March 10th, 2021. However, despite the top‐down indications for disclosing and reporting sustainability practices provided by this new policy, financial actors still lack a comprehensive framework on how to track and measure their social and environmental contributions within the perimeter of this novel institutional context. This paper discusses the implications for financial actors brought by the SDFR and builds a conceptual link with social impact measurement practices. In particular, the article provides a comprehensive framework that identifies strategic approaches and measurement tools for financial actors for building a more sustainable finance, that is a finance focused on the purest dimension of blended value and more attentive to sustainable development.

The current transformations in society, the economy and the public sector call for the development of more unified theoretical frameworks. This article takes the literature on strategic management as a theoretical entry angle and aims to better understand how the adoption of models of strategic management can enable processes of public value co-creation. Utilising the literature centred on the notion of ‘schools of thought’ in the strategic management of public services, the article discusses how co-creation as a mode of governance in public services can contribute to innovative public service solutions and value co-creation. The Welsh Water’s ‘Water Resilient Community’ – a project characterised by long-term strategic planning as well as by local innovation – is used to illustrate the argument. Four propositions on the drivers/enablers and key managerial issues for undertaking a strategic approach to co-creation as a mode of governance are offered to enhance future practice, research and theory.

This study explores how certain characteristics of the network structure, such as autonomization and connectivity, differently combine with individual leadership in order to produce high network performance. Data gathered through a survey of 265 networks for homecare assistance shed light on three different paths simultaneously leading to network success. First, the presence of autonomy from government (autonomization) appears to be able to ensure network success, irrespective of the other conditions. Secondly, the presence (or absence) of an individual network leader combines differently with the network’s connectivity. Sparsely connected networks seem to require a network leader, forging agreements and leading partners towards a common objective. On the contrary, in highly connected networks, it is the intensity of network ties that appears to lead the network (the network leader seems to be not important). These networks seem to be leaderless, but not necessarily leadershipless.

Only relatively recently, place leadership has become an important debate in the leadership studies and public administration literatures. From a place leadership perspective, there is clearly a potential role for third sector organisations and the voluntary engagement that citizens can play for places through different activities, such as for example social innovation, public services provision, volunteering, civic engagement, advocacy, enhancement of the quality of life, strengthening of social bonds and social cohesion. However, the topic of civil society and third sector organisations is still neglected in research and public policy debates on place-based leadership. Our special issue aims at filling this gap.

This paper focuses on a process of citizens and stakeholders’ engagement promoted by a local authority to co-design the city vision with multiple actors (politicians, public managers, consultants, citizens and other external stakeholders). The setting for this research is provided by a municipality in Sweden and our theoretical perspective is the decentred theory of governance. A multi-actor, longitudinal and qualitative analysis has been carried out by triangulating interviews with key stakeholders, non-participant observations, and documental analysis, and by collecting the empirical material at two points of time (2014–2018). Our findings present several narratives and show that four main governance games were played (political; reputational and professional; spectacle; and social games). We discuss how these games interplay may change the perception of actors about the process of citizens and stakeholders’ engagement.

Individuals and organisations within civil society play a crucial role in our cities, but little direct research has been carried out on their leadership role. By employing a place-based leadership approach, this article aims to identify the leaders of civil society in two cities, one in Italy (Padua) and one in the UK (Peterborough). We draw our results from 34 interviews with city leaders. Our findings highlight important similarities between the two cities, such as the fundamental function of umbrella organisations and the influence of faith leaders. We discuss the multi-form character of the leaders of civil society as acting within three main spheres of city leadership ‐ the third/voluntary sector, community and faith ‐ as highlighted by the participants in this study. We also find that civil society exercises the key leadership role of intermediary between citizens and government in public services delivery and in enabling community voice from different publics.

This chapter compares the Italian and the Spanish case discussing the influence of having elected or appointed mayors on local government systems. Five elements of the local government systems are compared: the electoral system and its influences on the political composition of the local government; the local government structure and the distribution of functions and powers between Mayor and council; the role of political parties; scrutiny of executive and accountability; citizen participation. Our comparative analysis highlights that overall directly elected mayors have ensured better efficiency in terms of quicker and faster decision making processes, even if mostly at the expenses of democratic representation. Having direct or appointed mayors also impacted on accountability and legitimacy patterns. However, all these effects depended not only on the way mayor is elected, but mostly on other mechanisms, such as, for example, the strong majority prize provided by the electoral law and the bond of coexistence existing between the mayor and the council.

This paper addresses the societal challenge of sustainably managing cultural heritage, a topic of great relevance for the sustainability of societies and their historical institutions. Specifically, it focuses on long-lasting collaborative systems set up between a public actor and civil society in response to the need for heritage asset preservation, here exploring the roles of both actors in establishing and governing the collaboration over the heritage asset. Our research is exploratory, and our qualitative study is based on 10 case studies purposefully selected from eight different European countries. Three emerging typologies have been identified: in the first, the public sector fully retains the governing power; in the second, the public sector and civil society jointly create a new institutional order; and in the third, the public sector delegates and gives power to civil society actors. The findings point to the key role played by civil society actors in activating collaborative governance, both through practices of functional collaboration and countergovernance. Finally, the article concludes by discussing the main theoretical and practical implications for future research in the field.