Digital challenges and opportunities: A new look on intermunicipal cooperation

Introduction: intermunicipal cooperation (IMC) is an important tool for tackling various socio-economic problems faced by municipalities in conditions of limited financial and material resources. However, the implementation of joint development projects may be hampered by several factors (deficit of local budgets, weak experience of local authorities, etc.). Objectives: to study the existing barriers to IMC development and the ways to overcome them in the context of municipal management digital transformation. Methods: general scientific methods of cognition, analysis of regulatory legal acts, point-rating assessment, content analysis of documents, website monitoring. Results: the experience of IMC implementing in the Russian regions has been analyzed; the main barriers to the IMC development have been systematized. A scoring assessment of the IMC information openness in the Volga Federal District (VFD) regions was carried out; directions for improving the use of digital tools to ensure IMC were proposed. Conclusions: the authors identified a wide range of obstacles to the IMC implementation: from obvious political, organizational and economic ones to such specific as geographical, socio-cultural barriers and digitalization barriers. The study of foreign experience has shown that IMC barriers can be overcome with the help of digital technologies such as online platforms for crowdfunding and resource exchange, collaborative electronic document management systems, online collaboration tools, shared data platforms, information portals and feedback systems, online platforms for joint training and advanced training, etc. However, local governments and regional associations of municipalities in Russia do not apply digital technologies in their activities, as shown by the analysis of the information openness of their official websites. The following were proposed to boost the use of IMC digital tools: digitalization and automation of IMC processes, increasing the availability of information on the forms and results of IMC in the Russian regions, digital monitoring and analytics of its development.