Digitalisation, Governance, and Innovation for Sustainable and Climate-Resilient Societies

Dear Colleagues,

Scope and Rationale

Societies worldwide are facing increasing pressures to achieve sustainable development, adapt to climate risks, modernise governance structures, and leverage digitalisation and innovation capacity to enhance resilience and social well-being. At the same time, accelerating digitalisation is reshaping economic systems, public governance, and societal interactions, creating new opportunities—as well as disparities—for sustainable and climate-resilient development. Global economies, therefore, confront the interconnected challenges of fostering economic growth, ensuring social and territorial inclusion, reducing environmental degradation, and strengthening adaptive capacity to climate change.

While digital transformation provides powerful tools to boost productivity, transparency, and adaptive capacity, its effectiveness depends fundamentally on the quality of governance, institutional integrity, innovation systems, and the ability of public and private actors to implement coherent sustainability strategies.

This Special Issue investigates the interactions between digitalisation, governance quality, and innovation capacity, aiming to foster economic growth, support sustainable development, strengthen climate and social resilience, and address emerging societal challenges. By integrating multiple scales of analysis (national, regional, local) and considering both economic and societal dimensions, the issue places digitalisation within a broader framework of inclusive, sustainable, and climate-adaptive development.

By examining these linkages across countries, regions, sectors, and governance levels, the Special Issue aims to identify the conditions under which digital and institutional transformations contribute to environmental sustainability, inclusive societal outcomes, economic development, and resilience to climate change. The overall goal is to generate robust evidence that informs governance reforms, digital strategies, climate adaptation policies, and innovation-driven pathways toward more resilient and equitable societies.

Topics of Interest

The Special Issue encourages empirical, data-driven contributions and comparative analyses of the interactions among digital transformation, governance quality, innovation capacity, economic growth, sustainable development, and climate resilience. Topics include, but are not limited to the following:

• Empirical and comparative studies examining how digitalisation, governance quality, and innovation capacity influence social resilience, equity, and inclusive development outcomes across communities and societies;
• Empirical studies assessing the impact of digital transformation on economic growth, sustainable development, firm-level performance, and climate resilience across countries, regions, and sectors;
• Quantitative and mixed-method analyses of governance quality, including transparency, accountability, regulatory effectiveness, and institutional integrity, as a determinant of sustainable development and digital and green innovation outcomes;
• Analyses of national, regional, and local governance structures and their interactions in shaping effective digital–green transition policies, regulatory frameworks, and sustainable development strategies;
• Investigations of innovation systems and firm-level innovation capacity, including R&D investment, technological adoption, and diffusion of low-carbon and climate-adaptive technologies;
• Integrated analyses examining the joint mechanisms through which digitalisation and governance quality shape climate-resilient and/or sustainable development outcomes;
• Studies on environmental sustainability performance, environmental management systems, ESG-related corporate practices, and firm-level environmental efficiency;
• Cross-country, cross-sector, and longitudinal studies examining policy coherence and the role of governance quality in facilitating or constraining digital–green transitions;
• Comparative and cross-country empirical studies examining how digital transformation, governance structures, innovation capacity, and fiscal mechanisms interact to drive economic growth, sustainable development, and climate resilience;
• Sector-specific analyses of digital and sustainable transitions (energy, transport, agriculture, manufacturing, services, smart cities), identifying barriers, opportunities, and best practices;
• Firm-level and micro-econometric studies, including corporate digitalisation, sustainability reporting, environmental innovation, and climate-resilience strategies;
• Studies evaluating policy and institutional innovations, such as digital governance reforms, regulatory frameworks, and green fiscal policies, and their impact on climate-resilient and sustainable economic outcomes;
• Methodologically innovative contributions employing panel econometrics, dynamic modelling, quantile regressions, fsQCA, mediation, moderation and causal analysis, large-scale data analytics (big data, AI, machine learning), novel metrics, digital sustainability indicators, micro- and macro-level evaluation methods, and causal inference techniques to analyse complex, heterogeneous, and non-linear relationships among digital transformation, governance quality, innovation capacity, and fiscal mechanisms, as well as their impact and effectiveness on economic growth, sustainable development, and climate resilience outcomes.

By integrating advanced analytical methods, including econometric and statistical methods, comparative and configurational methods, machine-learning and AI-based methods, mediation, moderation, and causal inference, as well as multi-level, mixed, and network approaches, this issue aims to capture the heterogeneous, context-dependent, and non-linear dynamics that shape global pathways toward economic growth, sustainable development, climate resilience, and environmentally responsible corporate strategies, providing robust evidence to inform policy, governance, and investment strategies.

Prof. Dr. Oana-Ramona Lobonț
Prof. Dr. Ana-Cristina Nicolescu
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• digitalisation
• governance quality
• innovation capacity
• sustainable development
• economic growth
• climate and societal resilience