Strengthening municipal resilience through digital governance maturity

Type of the article: Review ArticleAbstractAs disruptions intensify in frequency and complexity, municipalities face growing pressure from society to strengthen their resilience to navigate these disruptions, maintain critical functions under unstable conditions, recover effectively, adapt, and transform. Hence, this study examines how resilience strategies and digital governance maturity interact to shape municipalities’ capacity to cope with disruptions, and how the domains of strategy, people, and processes enable this relationship. Using a systematic literature review, we found that resilience is a multifaceted phenomenon, in which bounce-back, bounce-forward, and bounce-beyond strategies are complementary rather than sequential, requiring municipalities to balance continuity with adaptation and transformation. The synthesis also allowed us to conclude that the feasibility of these strategies varies with digital governance maturity: digital consistency tends to support robust continuity and reliable service delivery, digital adaptation enables learning and flexible reconfiguration, and digital transformation underpins structural change and renewal. Finally, we revealed that these strategy-maturity linkages are enabled by the extent to which strategy, people, and processes are aligned, including leadership and governance arrangements, employee capabilities, and redesigned procedures and routines.Building on these findings, we propose an integrative synthesis of the literature and derive concluding propositions linking municipal resilience strategies, i.e., bounce back, bounce forward, bounce beyond, with digital governance maturity levels, i.e., digital consistency, digital adaptation, digital transformation, through the alignment of strategy, people, and processes as the enabling mechanism shaping this relationship.AcknowledgmentThis research has received funding from the Research Council of Lithuania (LMTLT), agreement No. S-VIS-23-10.