Abstract
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Smart public governance (SPG) has considerable potential for modernizing public administration, improving public service delivery, dealing with increasingly more complex development imperatives, and promoting well-being. Together with an appropriate smart environment, SPG may contribute to achieving the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and its Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) set by the United Nations. Based on the comprehensive conceptual framework, the paper aims to present the performance of the EU countries in SPG, SDGs and smart environment, examine the efficiency of the EU countries in exploiting SPG practices to achieve SDGs and determine the relationship between these concepts. The data for the EU countries were obtained from several EU, OECD and other secondary data sources for the period before the crisis, i.e. 2020. The data were analysed with several different methodological approaches, namely measurement of composite indexes, comparative analysis of composite indexes and correlation analysis. The empirical results reveal the following. As regards the performance of the EU countries in SPG, SDGs and smart environment dimension, the results reveal that the overall performance of main dimensions varies greatly across EU countries. According to the SPG dimension results, Denmark and the United Kingdom are the top-performing countries, while Greece and Romania are the lowest-performing countries. Moreover, Sweden, Denmark, and the United Kingdom are the top-performing countries in the smart environment dimension, while Romania, Greece, and Bulgaria have the lowest performance. Finally, in the SDGs dimension, Austria and Denmark are the top-performing countries, while Croatia performs poorly. A further in-depth comparison of best and worst-performing EU countries reveals that Luxembourg, Ireland, and the United Kingdom, are facing efficiency shortages, while Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Malta and Croatia were identified as countries with relatively low levels of SPG and sustainable development. As concerned the implications of SPG and smart environment for SDGs, the results of correlation analysis indicate that SPG is strongly associated with SDGs, especially with social and environmental dimensions, with a smart environment also having an important role. The findings will be beneficial for policymakers by providing evidence-based guidelines for developing national policies that should support smart public governance and its beneficial implications for sustainable development.
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