Readiness Assessment of EU Countries to Achieve the Smart Sustainable Development Goals Through the Digital Transformation of Local Government

The transition to the digital era has become imperative in the last decades, with the pandemic as a key accelerator, as it made the need for digital transformation and growth of the digital economy more urgent. Digital transformation is a process where, in terms of sustainability in a society that must adapt to new data, it is intensified through the adoption of all those innovations that come from the 4th industrial revolution. This transformation does not only take advantage of what new technologies have to offer for the benefit of service providers and their users, but includes both new ways of shaping economic and social relationships, as well as strengthening the bond between Local Government and citizens. According to the Sustainable Developments Goals (SDGs) 2020 that were adopted in the Agenda 2030 (United Nations 2020), the Smart Sustainable Development model creates favorable conditions for development at regional level. Among other things, this model includes the use of innovation, smart management methods, integrated technological applications, as well as the direct participation of citizens. Precisely because the policies implemented at the level of local government to achieve the goals of Sustainable Development presuppose the citizens’ participation, are of particular importance. Due to the fact that local authorities provide services to citizens and that their overall administrative structure shows considerable variation between E.U. members for reasons attributed to political traditions and historical, geopolitical as well as socio-economic conditions, five main types of organization can be distinguished: the Napoleonic, the Anglo-Saxon, the Scandinavian, the Federal and the East European. The scope of this study is to assess the readiness of the different types of local governments of the member states regarding the implementation of the digital transformation of their services towards achieving the SDGs through the Smart Sustainable Development model. To achieve this scope, the goals of the study are