Abstract
Local governments, and here especially large cities, are the epicentres of the twin transition of sustainability and digitalization, as these challenges particularly manifest in the urban context. Emphasizing their interdependent character, the nascent scholarly theme of ‘digital sustainability’ suggests that innovative digital technologies help governments address sustainability issues. Digitalization and sustainability can reinforce each other but also clash, as unintended rebound effects resulting from digital technologies are often overlooked. Therefore, this commentary aims to stimulate critical reflection and advance a conceptual agenda on the possibility of ‘sustainable digitalization’ in cities. We suggest further developing the concept of ‘digital humanism’ as a heuristic device for the development and analysis of ‘smart’ solutions. This can help also to consider the unsustainable effects of digitalization that take shape in distant locations (e.g. affecting the far end of supply chains) and/or with a delay (e.g. affecting future generations). We thus offer a perspective that accounts for the global sustainability effects of local digital technologies and that avoids the pitfalls of presentism and solutionism by local decision-makers.
Points to Practitioners
1. Digital technologies introduced to advance sustainability goals can generate unintended ecological and social rebound effects. Municipal administrations should therefore institutionalize procedures to assess lifecycle impacts, energy and resource use, and social externalities before and during deployment.
2. Sustainable digitalization requires structured reflexivity. Cities can embed review mechanisms, impact assessments, and cross-departmental coordination processes that systematically examine tensions between digital efficiency gains and ecological or social costs.
3. Local governments should integrate a spatiotemporal perspective into routine decision-making, considering not only impacts on current local users but also long-term consequences and effects along global supply chains – asking, for example: ‘Who is affected here and now, and who is affected there and then?’
Keywords
Introduction: the twin transition of sustainability and digitalization in local governments
Digitalization and (ecological and social) sustainability are today's most powerful transformative forces (George et al., 2021; Pan and Zhang, 2020). They have been framed as ‘twin transition’ (European Commission, 2022) or ‘twin transformation’ (Mahringer, 2025; Schallmo et al., 2025) to emphasize that they can complement and enhance each other. Therefore, particularly the (general) management literature embraces ‘digital sustainability’ (e.g. Höllerer et al., 2026), which usually means the application of digital technologies to meet sustainability goals. Yet the topic has also started to gain some traction in public administration research (e.g. Esposito et al., 2024; Lember et al., 2025).
Especially in the context of local governments, and particularly in the urban context, the theme of ‘climate-neutral and smart cities’ (e.g. European Commission, 2023) has become increasingly popular. This is because today's cities are not only home to more than half of the world's population (World Bank, 2023) but also represent the epicentres of sustainability challenges as these manifest on the local level (Nathan, 2023). Indeed, cities consume over 65% of the world's energy and account for more than 70% of global carbon dioxide emissions (European Commission, 2023). In times when more and more national governments backtrack from climate action (Basseches et al., 2022), cities have come perhaps even more under pressure to implement ‘smart’ solutions to become more sustainable (Bibri and Krogstie, 2017; Höjer and Wangel, 2015; Mora et al., 2023).
Digital and sustainable transformative forces can reinforce each other; however, they can also clash (European Commission, 2022). The current enthusiasm about digital sustainability bears the risk of jeopardizing sustainability ambitions by naïve implementation of digital technologies. Negative externalities of such technologies that might even exceed the benefits simply tend to be overlooked. While ‘digital-era government’ tools can be used to address sustainability issues, Margetts and Dunleavy (2024, p. 1) warn that the implications of digital change ‘have been under-researched in public management and accountability studies’.
In this commentary, building on critical strands of urban and digitalization scholarship, we illuminate the interdependent character of the twin transition and shed light on the possibility of ‘sustainable digitalization’, which aims to consider ecological and social rebound effects of digital technologies. While immediate negative effects such as the ‘digital divide’ (van Dijk, 2020) are increasingly discussed, ecological and social externalities that unfold over time (especially impacting future generations) and/or manifest in distant locations (such as at the far end of the supply chain) have received only little attention. This often leads to the situation that smart technologies are implemented with high local ambitions favouring sustainability but, eventually, contribute to a less sustainable world.
The commentary positions itself explicitly as a debate contribution. Its purpose is to stimulate critical reflection and advance a conceptual agenda on sustainable digitalization, thereby introducing a novel perspective into one of today's central debates. To focus attention on this issue, we suggest and further refine the concept of ‘digital humanism’, which is deeply entangled with the local government context because it is often in cities where technology, governance and human life intersect most intensively. As a heuristic tool, this concept has the potential to reduce the temporal and spatial distance between pro-digitalization decision-making and its dysfunctionalities, which often manifest only remotely.
Enthusiasm for digital sustainability
One emerging stream of the literature, predominantly rooted in general management, widely views digital technologies as promising solutions to address sustainability issues. Recently, scholars advocating a ‘functionalist’ perspective have coined the term ‘digital sustainability’ to promote the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals through the strategic deployment of digitally enabled resources and solutions (see also Höllerer et al., 2026). In the public administration literature, the relationship between the two drivers of transformation has so far been little researched from such a perspective, perhaps with the exception of the work by Dedovic and Crompvoets (2025) and Lember et al. (2025).
Digital sustainability thus merges the goals of becoming sustainable with digital tools (George et al., 2021; Pan and Zhang, 2020) and reinforces that ‘the use of technologies in everyday business applications to address climate-related issues and improve Environmental, Social and Governance outcomes, can play an important role in combatting climate change’ (Pan et al., 2022). A study by Zhang et al. (2022) has argued that the adoption of digital technologies and resulting innovations ‘are expected to bring breakthroughs for addressing these challenges and enabling cities’ sustainability’ (p. 1), indicating that actors could, for example, ‘benefit from AI [artificial intelligence] for sustainability’ (p. 12).
Ecological and social rebound effects of digital sustainability
In the context of local governments, ‘green’ (see Garcia-Lamarca et al., 2021) and ‘smart’ (see Meijer and Bolívar, 2016) transformations were initially discussed separately. Later, the theme of ‘smart sustainable cities’ emerged (Bibri and Krogstie, 2017; Höjer and Wangel, 2015), indicating the interdependency between the two drivers. This is because smartness alone does not ensure sustainability, and sustainable is not always smart either in terms of technology use (Ahvenniemi et al., 2017).
Voices, especially those outside of the management field, however, are much more critical in their assessment of digitalization's potential to mitigate sustainability challenges. Focusing on the unintended side-effects of digital technologies for sustainable development, the general view of ‘critical’ or ‘problematizing’ perspectives (see also Höllerer et al., 2026) is that these technologies ‘create entirely new issues that are without precedence’ (Bohnsack et al., 2022: 600), heavily challenging assumptions by ‘techno-optimists’ that ‘tell us that the answer to the ecological crisis lies in […] technological innovation’ (Aggeri, 2023: 22). Negative side-effects are attributed either to digitalization and digital technologies as enabling infrastructures, or to the models built upon them – particularly market-driven and profit-oriented business models, and they can manifest on the ecological and the social level.
Ecological side-effects
The environmental and critical urban management literatures present examples of detrimental ecological consequences of innovative digital technologies. Globally, digital penetration – and the associated energy consumption – skews heavily towards urban areas. In 2023, worldwide, 81% of residents of cities used the internet, compared with just 50% in rural areas (ITU, 2023). Data centres and cloud computing facilities are already estimated to account for a substantial share of global electricity and water consumption, a trend recently characterized as a ‘hunger’ for energy and a ‘digital thirst’ (Bradshaw, 2026; Yañez-Barnuevo, 2025, 2026). Moreover, their ecological footprint is expected to grow considerably in the future (Sovacool et al., 2022). Accounting for around 10% of global electricity demand and approximately 3% of global greenhouse gas emissions, online infrastructure and digital services are on par with the airline industry (Sovacool et al., 2022). The machine learning applications and AI algorithms that are used in today's municipal infrastructure and services, as well as companies that are often located in cities, utilize substantial amounts of energy for computation power and cooling (Sundberg, 2024). The electricity consumption of digital tools varies significantly, with AI-driven solutions typically at the higher end of the spectrum. For instance, a single query to a large language model is estimated to consume approximately ten times more electricity than a standard web search (Pramer, 2024).
Furthermore, hardware items such as semiconductors, batteries or solar panels play a pivotal role in achieving global climate goals, as they serve as essential components, e.g. in computers regulating dynamic traffic flows, electric vehicles or renewable energy production in cities. Yet they also have ecological consequences, as the example of the semiconductor industry in the Taiwan region illustrates. TSMC, for example, the world's largest chipmaker based in the city of Hsinchu, was estimated to account for around 7.2% of total electricity consumption in Taiwan in 2022 and utilized approximately 63 billion litres of water in 2019 (Belton, 2021). The company's water consumption sparked controversy during a recent severe drought on the island of Taiwan, the worst in 50 years. Another recent estimation indicated that the demand for data storage made from silicon will soon surpass the worldwide production of silicon per year (Jariwala and Lee, 2023).
On the other hand, solutions that essentially build on digital platforms flourished especially in cities under the umbrella term of the ‘sharing economy’. Platforms, on which such sharing economy solutions mostly build, also presumably offered avenues for addressing sustainability concerns (Martin, 2016). However, considerable critique emerged that the sharing economy was ‘unlikely to drive a transition to sustainability’ (Martin, 2016: 149), as platform business models tend to stimulate additional travel and consumption rather than simply substituting existing services. For instance, research examining the carbon footprint of Airbnb in Sydney has found that the direct and indirect carbon emissions are comparable with those of economy hotels (Cheng et al., 2020).
Regarding indirect negative sustainability effects, ride-hailing business models such as Uber's have raised concerns as they represent platform-based mobility services predominantly offered in cities. A study by the Union of Concerned Scientists (2020: 2) revealed that ‘a typical ride-hailing trip is about 69 percent more polluting than the trips it replaces’. Similarly, the environmental ramifications of urban freight and parcel transport remain contentious, as they are recognized as one of the most significant sources of unsustainability, not least spurred by the increasing pressure that fast shipping of goods, driven by the surge of e-commerce, brings about (Muñoz-Villamizar et al., 2020).
Social side-effects
Already about a decade ago, the urban studies literature began to adopt a widely critical stance towards digitalization, emphasizing its negative consequences on the social sphere. Smart city concepts have been associated with an overly neoliberal ethos and market-driven technocentric solutions (Joss et al., 2019; Kitchin, 2015). Accordingly, digital approaches often lose their critical capacity of being solutions, either by downplaying some of the underlying municipal issues (Hollands, 2008), or, even worse, by creating novel social problems. For example, it has been discussed that ‘AI needs the city in order to increase and improve its intelligence’ (Cugurullo et al., 2024: 1170). In a recent commentary, Grossi and Welinder (2024) examined the nexus of technologies, organizations and humans within smart cities. Their results indicate that one-size-fits-all solutions are difficult because the social consequences of using digital technology also depend very much on the context. A broader, multi-faceted conception of ‘smartness’ thus facilitates value generation for diverse stakeholders.
In recent years, examples of social challenges associated with the ‘digital divide’ (van Dijk, 2020) have gained in prominence, addressing systematic social exclusion of people that cannot use digital technologies. For instance, many city bike services, which have become popular owing to their benefits for sustainability and well-being, rely on a digitalized access. This also means that the very people who need the services the most and rely on the social function of public and municipal services might be the ones that are excluded (Keseru and Randhahn, 2023).
Such a divide can also cast a shadow on the future, for example, when certain social groups are not represented by mobile phone data used for the planning of urban traffic infrastructure (Durand et al., 2022). A recent study, for instance, explored digital shared mobility services in cities through the perspective of disadvantaged groups and emphasized that ‘the increasing digital gap may exacerbate transport disadvantages’ (Keseru and Randhahn, 2023: v), as the digital divide is projected onto and thus perpetuated into the future.
Another example for social side-effects is ‘surveillance capitalism’ (Zuboff, 2023), emphasizing that personal digital data (such as patient data from a municipal hospital) are in need of active protection against powerful business interests. Referring again to the mobility example, it is also clear by now that large platforms such as Google (e.g. Google Maps) have a better understanding of the physical movements of citizens than public managers who look to deliver effective digital services. While cities try to administer decisions about the local space and take concrete measures, (big) tech aspires increasingly to ‘acquire greater power over cities’ – that in turn challenges ‘who owns the city’, ultimately altering sovereignty of local governments (Sadowski, 2021: 1740).
A final example relates to ‘ghostwork’ (Gray and Suri, 2017), i.e. invisible, usually marginalized and low-paid workers that keep platforms running that are predominantly used by the urban population (e.g. for food delivery or rideshares). Such dark facets of digital innovations (Trittin-Ulbrich et al., 2021) and the ‘dependence and rebound effects generated by the development of technological innovations’ (Aggeri, 2023: 24) call for deeper investigation into whether and how sustainable digitalization is possible.
Digital humanism
In an attempt to address the identified negative side effects of digitalization, the nascent concept of ‘digital humanism’ represents a ‘reflexive’ perspective (see also Höllerer et al., 2026), that is, an effort to critically reflect on and advance a human-focused approach to digital innovations and technologies (Nida-Rümelin, 2022; Werthner et al., 2024). The concept has been developed with a special emphasis on the urban context (Stampfer, 2022) and can be seen as part of wider endeavours to refocus current transformation activities on essentially serving human needs, such as ‘human-centred design’ (Norman, 2023) or a ‘human-centric lens of value creation’ (Parmar et al., 2021). In the specific context of local governments, a human needs-based framework to assess municipalities and envision their development has been suggested by Cardoso et al. (2021).
As starting point for digital humanism, it has been noted that [L]ike all technologies, digital technologies do not emerge from nowhere. They are shaped by implicit and explicit choices and thus incorporate a set of values, norms, economic interests, and assumptions about how the world around us is or should be. Many of these choices remain hidden in software programs implementing algorithms that remain invisible […]. We must shape technologies in accordance with human values and needs, instead of allowing technologies to shape humans. (Strassnig et al., 2019: 78)
As the host city for this international initiative, Vienna has been demonstrating a strong commitment to embracing the principles of digital humanism. Vienna aims to consider the broader impact of digitalization on citizens to meet better decisions regarding the design, use and implementation of digital technologies. Specifically, Vienna has pledged to ‘provide a basis for developing the digital humanism in and by the city administration’, ensuring that digitalization is actively shaped by the principle of placing ‘human beings with their social and societal needs’ (City of Vienna, 2022: 3) at the centre.
For example, recent research has attempted to investigate AI's impact through a sustainability lens, finding both positive (e.g. better waste and pollution management) and negative (e.g. more power and resource consumption) effects on the environment (Kopka and Grashof, 2022). Regarding the latter, the global energy demand of data centres is expected to triple by 2030 (Goldman Sachs, 2024). Recent decisions of tech giants to invest in nuclear power plants to power their data centres further vividly demonstrate the tension between digitalization and sustainability (Amazon, 2024; Google, 2024). Digital humanism now emphasizes the importance of using AI to realize the potentials of digitalization without compromising human responsibility and ethical decision-making, as well as expanding the scope of accountability in managing AI systems (Nida-Rümelin, 2022). Especially in complex contexts such as in cities, the principles conveyed by digital humanism can assist decision-makers in deploying digital technologies to improve the well-being and living conditions of residents, while at the same time empowering human judgement to care for social and ethical considerations.
However, digital humanism, as well as wider human-centric approaches, faces critical shortcomings. First, the environmental impact of digitalization stays somewhat in the background. Second, the concept as it is currently discussed has a focus on the user groups affected by the implementation of digital technologies in a focal place. However, Norman (2023) reminds us that where a ‘human-centred’ focus puts a face to a user, ‘humanity-centred’ expands this view further beyond: to the societal level of world populations who face highly complex and interrelated problems that are most often tangled up in large, sophisticated, ‘human-caused’ systems. Thus, humanity-centred design represents the ultimate challenge in attempts to help people to improve their lives.
Taken together, the focus of digital humanism in the context of local governments lies more on the ‘here and now’, which means that it calls to address all affected people in a given municipality/place, at a given time. In this sense, the concept says so far little when it comes to sustainability threats that mainly manifest in the future (as ecological issues usually do) or at distant places, i.e. the ‘there and then’.
For example, digital innovations can raise social, economic and ethical concerns far from the original location of the innovation, such as shown by the example of Kenyan crowdworkers that made generative AI applications such as ChatGPT possible, earning less than $2 per hour for a vital task of removing toxic language from training data (Floridi, 2023). Overall, we argue that while the concept of digital humanism constitutes a promising starting point, it needs to be enhanced by a more explicit spatiotemporal perspective.
Extending the scope of digital humanism: local digital solutions, global sustainability effects
Our commentary calls for an integrated view of the interdependent drivers of the twin transition. Such an integrated view not only builds on potential benefits but also considers the potential (direct or indirect) harms of an instrumentalization of digital innovations for sustainability.
In a critical essay, Franzen (2019) criticized the ‘European Union's biofuel mandate, which served to accelerate the deforestation of Indonesia for palm-oil plantations’. What he referred to as a ‘Kafkaesque joke’ illustrates two important points: sustainability is inherently a global issue, while instruments – even those designed to promote greater sustainability – are always local in nature. Instruments that are intended to serve sustainability therefore must prove globally sustainable, which means that ecological and social rebound effects that manifest in distant locations and/or with a delay must be considered. To support cities in addressing the twin transition, we therefore suggest including a spatiotemporal perspective in digital humanism.
First, with respect to adding a temporal perspective to digital humanism that also takes into account future generations, the key concept of sustainability as laid down in the Brundtland Report of the UN provides a starting point. This report explicated that ‘[s]ustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’ (United Nations, 1987: 37). Similarly, work from the organization science field also has made the point that sustainability is, by definition, embedded in intertemporality, as it engages an effort of reconciliation of the needs of the present with the needs of the future (Garud and Gehman, 2012). This is also echoed in the debate on climate change that largely departs from ‘the principle of intergenerational equity’ (Slawinski and Bansal, 2015: 542; see also Aggeri, 2023). With this, a perception of a ‘long-present perspective’ instead of a ‘discrete moment perspective’ can help remove the dichotomy between present and future and evade short-termism (Kim et al., 2019).
Second, not only human interests in a focal municipality but also human interests elsewhere are to be considered. This extension is so far less considered in the literature. As an exception, Coenen et al. (2012) have introduced a spatial perspective on sustainability transitions. The authors argue that there is a need for better understanding the ‘trans-local nature of transition dynamics’ (Coenen et al., 2012: 968). Indeed, the digital humanism concept falls far short in accounting for externalities on a spatial level and thus integrating recent insights from organization and general management (e.g. Bansal and Grewatsch, 2020; Kim et al., 2019) is a fruitful avenue in advancing a transformative public administration agenda.
Extending digital humanism in the two described ways can enable ‘sustainability-oriented innovation’ (Bansal and Grewatsch, 2020: 220). We thus turn the notion of ‘digital sustainability’ upside down and urge scholars and practitioners to carve out the conditions under which the counterpart, i.e. ‘sustainable digitalization’, becomes a possibility in cities. Here, Barth et al. (2023: 6) formulated the essential question: ‘Can digitalization be designed in such a way that it does not harm the environment or promote unsustainable lifestyles?’
Taken together, the above-mentioned tensions arising from the interdependent character of the twin transition call for a long-term and geographically broadened perspective. Our commentary is a call for more interdisciplinary work on the visible and invisible consequences of digitalization for sustainability.
Turning sustainable digitalization into action in local governments
Cities occupy a critical position at the forefront of sustainability transitions. As epicentres of ecological and social challenges, they play a pivotal role in achieving climate neutrality in the coming decades, for instance in line with ambitions articulated in the European Green Deal (European Commission, 2023). Many cities are committing to the Sustainable Development Goals and pursuing net-zero targets, recognizing their responsibility in global sustainability governance (Bery and Haddad, 2022). Recent political shifts at the EU level towards competitiveness and deregulation, however, risk weakening supra-national sustainability ambitions. Paradoxically, this may further intensify the pressure on cities to act as key arenas where sustainability challenges must be addressed in practice.
Despite this growing responsibility, the tension between local digital decisions and their broader ecological and social repercussions often remains insufficiently addressed in both research and administrative practice. There is still no coherent framework guiding municipalities in assessing the global and long-term impacts of digital technologies beyond the boundaries of a focal city in space and time. Moreover, how municipal decision-makers conceptualize the relationship between digitalization and sustainability, how they perceive trade-offs and how they attempt to manage rebound effects remain largely open empirical questions.
These challenges are compounded by the institutional complexity of contemporary urban governance. Decision-making in large cities rarely occurs in a centralized and linear fashion. Instead, municipal administrations operate within fragmented organizational landscapes that include a variety of decentralized providers across the public, private and non-profit sectors (Leixnering et al., 2021). Similar challenges are therefore often addressed through heterogeneous solutions across units, potentially producing inconsistent strategies or unintended cumulative effects. The dual pressures of the twin transition – to digitalize and to decarbonize – unfold simultaneously in this fragmented environment, making integrated approaches particularly demanding.
At the same time, measurement, monitoring and reporting regimes increasingly render cities visible units of accountability. The Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (European Commission, 2024), for example, requires large business firms to identify and mitigate adverse environmental and human rights impacts across their supply chains. While primarily targeting corporations, such regulatory frameworks indirectly affect municipally owned enterprises and may inspire local policymakers to strengthen sustainability governance mechanisms. In this sense, cities are simultaneously recipients of regulatory pressures and laboratories for bottom-up innovation.
Against this background, moving towards ‘sustainable digitalization’ requires more than isolated best practices. Such a move calls for systematic institutionalized procedures that integrate a spatiotemporal perspective into everyday administrative decision-making. Concretely, municipal leaders may consider four interrelated steps:
Mapping roles and assumptions – creating a transparent overview of how digital technologies are expected to contribute to sustainability objectives across departments and affiliated organizations. Identifying rebound effects – systematically tracing potential negative feedback loops, including energy consumption, resource extraction, social exclusion, or labour externalities along global supply chains. Institutionalizing reflexivity – developing structured procedures, such as interdisciplinary review panels or sustainability impact assessments, that explicitly examine tensions between digital efficiency gains and ecological or social costs. Embedding long-term accountability – establishing governance mechanisms that extend responsibility beyond immediate users and electoral cycles.
Examples from digitalization projects in local governments illustrate what such institutionalization might entail. New digital policies can be stress-tested for their long-term implications, including data privacy protection, algorithmic bias and hardware e-waste across the full lifecycle of a project. Municipalities may mandate interoperable data standards to prevent technological lock-in and reduce resource duplication. They might also experiment with forms of ‘proxy representation’ for future residents when assessing infrastructural digital investments. A guiding question that could anchor such practices is: ‘If we automate this administrative decision today, what effects will it have on people here and now – but also there and then?’
Framing digitalization decisions through this lens transforms sustainability from an aspirational goal into an evaluative criterion embedded within administrative routines. In this way, ‘sustainable digitalization’ becomes less a matter of technological optimism and more a matter of governance design.
Conclusion: an integrated view on sustainability and digitalization
The goal of this commentary was to illuminate the interdependent character of the twin transition and shed light on the possibility of ‘sustainable digitalization’ of cities as highly relevant entities of public administration. We aimed to stimulate critical reflection and advance a conceptual agenda around ‘sustainable digitalization’. This is much needed, as digitalization and sustainability are still very often seen as ‘parallel tracks’ (Lember et al., 2025), or technology is foremost regarded as an enabler and a solution to environmental problems by city managers, with a missing integrated strategic vision (Dedovic and Crompvoets, 2025). Making insights from critical urban management literature available to public administration research, we drew attention to the widely invisible ecological and social rebound effects that come with smart efforts. We then suggested ‘digital humanism’ as a heuristic tool that, complemented by a spatiotemporal perspective, can help mitigate negative externalities of smart technologies that take shape in distant locations and/or with a delay. Such a perspective, we argue, contributes to overcoming both the ‘presentism’ (Hawken et al., 2025) – the prioritization of the here and now over the there and then – and ‘solutionism’ (Aggeri, 2023), that is the naïve focus on mostly digital technologies as solutions without dealing with the challenges they bring, from which current decision-making often suffers.
Awareness is growing, especially as the environmental impacts of tech infrastructure become more visible. Tech giants’ ambitions for reducing the carbon footprint by not only increasing their renewable energy sources like wind and solar to power data centres, but also debating nuclear power reactors (Amazon, 2024; Google, 2024), show the imminence of the tension between digitalization and sustainability. Meanwhile, the energy generated by data centres can be also put to good use in cities, for instance in providing heat for hospitals (Vienna, Austria), swimming pools (Exmouth, UK) or residential homes (Stockholm, Sweden), all examples of a circular energy model (de Gallier, 2024).
However, ‘transformative capacities’ (Wolfram et al., 2019) for sustainable digitalization will need to be built on more than just such best practices; systematic approaches are required, not isolated examples, even if they are effective. Future studies are thus to flesh out actionable approaches to ‘sustainable digitalization’ that transcend the boundaries of municipal organizations and their internal units. Insights into the establishment of a both reflexive and integrated perspective in administrations require immediate attention to how local governments orchestrate actors across sectors in their efforts (Kilpatrick and Conroy, 2024). There is so far hardly any empirical or theoretical research on this. Not only the interdependency of digitalization and sustainability, but also the fragmentation of both local and global approaches, necessitate harmonization of approaches to reach global sustainability goals. If convincing solutions for sustainable digitalization are developed in pioneer municipalities, this will surely have an impact and serve as a role model across organizational, local government and sector boundaries. At the same time, public management and accountability studies need to scrutinize these solutions (Margetts and Dunleavy, 2024).
In short, digitalization for sustainability must serve the needs of people – both here and elsewhere, and both now and in the future. Hence, it is digitalization itself that needs to become sustainable, perhaps even more than sustainability solutions becoming digitalized. Corresponding actions by local governments, especially large cities, can therefore have significant leverage in advancing the digital humanism agenda. ‘Our struggle for global sustainability will be won or lost in cities’, former UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon put it simply (UN Press, 2012) – in smart cities, we might add. For such cities, ‘digital humanism’ seeks to improve decisions about and the implementation of digital technologies (Himpele, 2026). Extending the concept by incorporating both temporal and spatial dimensions reflects the responsibilities that accompany cities’ sustainability commitments, if taken seriously, namely, that local digital technologies have global sustainability effects. Actionable solutions in administrative practice for addressing the twin transition challenge remain in their infancy. Yet acknowledging the challenge in its full complexity – and reflecting systematically on how to address it – would constitute an essential first step.
Footnotes
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Jubilee Fund of the City of Vienna for WU Vienna.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.