Municipal resilience through digital governance: the influence of maturity levels

Abstract

By highlighting municipal capacity to cope with adversities, this study raises important questions about how the maturity of digital governance interacts with various resilience strategies and how that interaction influences municipalities' crisis response. Although most of the existing research (Shen et al., 2023; Profiroiu and Nastacă, 2021; Carlsson et al., 2023) reveals that digital transformation serves as a facilitator that enables the transition from recovery resilience to transformative resilience, others (Gangneux and Joss, 2022) argue that the pandemic was a major driver for digital transformation. Thus, this study attempts to reveal the interconnections between digital governance and organizational ability to cope with adversities through their resilience. Using different levels to explore digital maturity, that is, digital consistency, digital adaptation, and digital transformation, and different levels to explore resilience, that is, bounce-back, bounce-forward, and bounce-beyond, we analyze these interconnections to find out whether higher digital governance municipalities demonstrate higher resilience levels and vice versa. Methodology/methods. Systematic literature review and nonparametric structural equation modeling (SEM-PLS) methodology. Results (preliminary). The systematic literature review results allowed us to conclude that digital governance has been pivotal during the pandemic, enabling organizations to continue to function during crises across different contexts. However, we observed that most studies address resilience from a general perspective, such as resilience, capacity to change, or crisis. The same was concluded about digital governance. We found that most articles examining organizational capacity to cope with adversities by enhancing digital governance capacity approached it from a general perspective or used the concept of digital transformation, which in some cases was used to signal separate elements of digitalization instead of true digital transformation. Thus, these findings suggest exploring the municipal capacity to cope with adversity from the perspective of different levels of digital and resiliency maturity. Further, using the data collected from all sixty municipalities in Lithuania, we will explore the interconnectedness amongst different levels of digitalization and resilience, which could provide insights into whether higher levels of digital governance enhance municipal resilience. Originality. In seeking to understand more about the resilience development patterns in municipalities through the different maturity levels of digitalization, we have turned our attention to the interactions that provide more profound knowledge about the development patterns of municipal capacities to cope with adversities through the enablement of digital governance. This project has received funding from the Research Council of Lithuania (LMTLT), agreement No. S-VIS-23-10.