Trust And Governance in a Rethinking of Classical Knowledge Management Paradigms: Toolkits for Public Sector During the COVID-19 Emergency

Abstract

The post Covid-19 world is characterized by new technologies and a smart city approach. For this reason, the public sector must shift from the classic paradigms to a new way, following a Knowledge Management (KM) approach, to perform its role in dealing with emergency situations. Starting from classical KM models, we conducted a regional case study, showing how the process of rethinking is boosted by citizens’ needs and pushed by the trust of the stakeholders in the central authority. In fact, as highlighted by part of the international literature, local authorities’ planning aims to achieve public value and alignment between stakeholders and policy making represents one of the main goals to be achieved. With an OLS regression we estimated the correlation between the trust of citizens and the statutory actions taken by central and peripheral government, showing that only with the alignment of public policies and the will of the citizens is it possible to overcome a crisis. Moreover, we underline the gaps in the literature and the missing links, with the aim of creating a KM model that can also be applied in the near future.

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“…al. (2021b, 2022 to provide more details that can contribute to better understanding how the public policy has affected local authorities.…”

“…Part of international literature has shown that the reaction on extraordinary events such as Covid-19 has modified what it has been considered for decades the so called "Knowledge management toolkit for public policies (Robinson et al, 2010)" considering new variables such as the trust of citizens in the public policy (Berardi et. al, 2022), (figure 1).…”

“…In the post covid era, digitalization and knowledge management practices should be considered two of the main leverages in the creation process of public value (Berardi et. al.…”

“…As shown in different studies, knowledge management has deeply conditioned the public administration scenario in different countries even if the most investigated one until know it is Italy as it is considered the most hardly hit by the pandemic (Berardi et. al, 2022;Sebastiani et.…”