From Digital to Smart Villages: Concept, Characteristics, and Development Pathways in Rural Bangladesh and Global South

Abstract

The implementation of smart villages serves as an essential advancement from the digitalization-based efforts to improve rural areas in the Global South that face continual economic, governance, and service delivery exclusion from their rural citizens. The existing projects in Bangladesh, which aim to establish digital villages through improving connectivity and e-service delivery, lack both a clear definition of smart village elements and a verified method for developing these elements. The study introduces a local particularity framework that scientists use to define smart villages and to create local pathways for developing these villages in Bangladesh. The Global South uses smart village development as its main approach to achieving rural transformation but Bangladesh has developed only limited methods to evaluate this development within its areas facing climate threats and institutional inconsistencies. The study defines smart villages through multiple dimensions by creating the Smart Village Index (SVI) that evaluates rural development based on infrastructure and governance and digital services and livelihood innovation and social inclusion and climate resilience. The research team conducted their study through a mixed-method approach which included village-level surveys and institutional assessments and GIS-based spatial profiling and comparative case analysis to investigate five village clusters in Bangladesh which included Kaliganj (Gazipur) and Mithapukur (Rangpur) and Shyamnagar (Satkhira) and Char Kukri Mukri (Bhola) and a remote haor settlement (Sunamganj). The research results show that rural areas experience major differences in development because peri-urban and institutionally dense villages achieve better smartness scores than ecologically vulnerable char and wetland areas which remain outside digital access despite having infrastructure development. The study demonstrates that smart village development requires more than technology diffusion which interacts with governance capabilities and livelihood diversity and inclusion patterns and environmental threats. The study introduces a new theoretical framework to understand rural smartness through ICT4D and development-as-freedom while the study proposes a phased Vision 2041 Smart Village Roadmap for Bangladesh as its policy recommendation. Smart villages need a new definition which sees them as development ecosystems that enable rural equalization while building pathways for sustainable development instead of their current role as technological demonstration sites.