Smart Village and Rural Transformation: Opportunities and Challenges

This paper aims to shift the current geographical epicentrum by zooming in on the main issues surrounding ‘smart village’. Being often seen as a peripheral geographical unit, the diffusion of digital technology in rural areas is interestingly unavoidable. Technocrats from both developed and developing countries have been increasingly attracted by the promises offered by the utilization of digital technology for rural development. To this end, the objectives of this paper are twofold. First, this study sketchs what smart village actually means and how this concept has been adopted in several developing countries by virtue of literature review. Second, we use the case of Banyuwangi, Indonesia, to dissect the main drivers underlying smart village development. The data used for the second objective was mainly retrieved from a series of in-depth interviews with relevant actors in Banyuwangi in 2020 (online). This paper concludes the need to place smart villages as a means to achieve certain development priorities. In doing so, the three key drivers of smart villages, i.e., policy, technology, and human, should be utilized equally as (digital) technology alone is not enough to drive a city/region’s digital transformation.