Bridging global evidence and local realities: the Rais-MR3 digital governance model for transforming village fund management

This study investigates how the Rais-MR3 model can support the digital transformation of village fund governance in Indonesia by connecting global evidence with local institutional realities. A convergent mixed-methods design was employed, combining bibliometric mapping of 179 Scopus-indexed publications from 2015 to 2025 with qualitative field research in nine villages across South Sulawesi, East Kalimantan, and West Java. The bibliometric strand serves as an evidence map, identifying transparency, accountability, and participation as the most recurrent governance dimensions in the literature and showing that these dimensions are rarely integrated into empirically examined village-level digital governance models. The qualitative strand provides the study’s main empirical contribution by examining how Rais-MR3 is interpreted and enacted across different village contexts through interviews, focus group discussions, and non-participant observation. The findings show that Rais-MR3 works most effectively when digital tools are embedded in administrative routines, information disclosure practices, verification processes, and participatory oversight rather than treated as stand-alone technical solutions. Cross-case analysis indicates that transparency becomes more salient when information asymmetry and public trust are central concerns; accountability is more prominent when procedural discipline and role clarity are stronger; and participation is more visible when community deliberation and feedback are institutionally supported. These patterns suggest that the model operates adaptively rather than uniformly, with local administrative capacity, digital readiness, and socio-cultural conditions shaping which governance dimension becomes most prominent in practice.