Assessment of sustainable regional development in the digital environment: digital tools in development strategies, programs, and projects

The concept of sustainable development is an important management guideline at the level of individual organizations (3P concept), corporate governance (ESG agenda), regions and countries (resilience to shocks and achievement of sustainable development goals). The weakness of sustainable development ratings is their static nature, insufficient predictive potential, and limited opportunities for making management decisions. Sustainable development management in the digital environment determines the need to develop special assessment and diagnostic methods that allow both analyzing the achieved quantitative results in the economic, social, and environmental spheres of the region, and studying the determining factors and reasons. Under present-day conditions, the main factors are digital tools as determinants of achieving sustainable development goals. The goal of the study is to assess the use of digital tools in development projects, programs, and strategies of the constituent entities of the Russian Federation and to identify the industry and regional features of the digital support of sustainable development in the constituent entities of the Russian Federation. The hypothesis of the study is that the constituent entities of the Russian Federation are strongly differentiated by the level of using digital tools in the implementation of regional development strategies, programs, and projects in the economic, social, environmental, and management spheres related to their industry specialization, which determine the achievement of qualitative and quantitative sustainable development goals. Research methods include content analysis, distance method, and structural analysis. The statistical base consisted of data from the regional strategies for the digital transformation of the constituent entities of the Russian Federation, as well as the Atlas of Economic Specialization of Regions of Russia. The study resulted in the systematization of approaches to understanding the sustainable development of regions, reviewed official ratings and methods for assessing the sustainable development of countries and regions, developed and tested a methodological approach to regional rating that takes into account the processes of achieving results - the use of digital technologies in development projects and programs. The study revealed that the industry specialization of regions has varying degrees of influence on the digital support of sustainable development. Medium-specialized regions are characterized by the maximum differentiation in digital support. The obtained results can be useful to federal authorities in elaborating methodological guidelines for the selection and recommendation of regional development projects, as well as to regional authorities in developing and implementing sustainable development strategies and digital transformation strategies.