Resilience at the Local Level: Linking Digital Governance Maturity to Municipal Resilience Empirical Insights from Lithuania

Digital governance is increasingly viewed as a key driver of municipal resilience, enabling municipalities to modernize operations, streamline service delivery, and strengthen citizen engagement through e-government and participatory tools, thereby enhancing transparency and public value and catalyzing innovative outcomes. Accordingly, this study examines how digital governance maturity (digital consistency, adaptation, transformation) interacts with resilience strategies (bounce back, bounce forward, bounce beyond) to shape municipalities’ capacity to cope with disruptions, and how alignment of strategy, people, and processes domains enables this relationship. Drawing on prior research, this study proposes and tests a model linking different levels of digital governance maturity to distinct municipal resilience strategies. The model is empirically examined using CB-SEM, based on survey responses collected from all sixty municipalities in Lithuania. The results indicate that digital governance maturity at the digital consistency stage is not significantly associated with municipal resilience strategies. In contrast, digital adaptation has a strong, positive, and significant effect across all three resilience strategies, while digital transformation has a negative but significant effect, suggesting that overly ambitious digital reforms may undermine resilience if institutional readiness and governance integration are insufficient.