Digital Sustainability Framework

In the near term, achieving sustainability is one of humanity’s most vital objectives. For sustainability to become a mindset and not merely a goal, it needs to encompass all fields, including digital. This white paper elaborates on the Saudi Government's steps toward digital sustainability. The paper will first present the concept and mechanisms of digital sustainability and then, in-depth, the digital sustainability framework and the Saudi Government’s implementation process to move toward digital sustainability. Cognizant that the path toward digital sustainability is complex, the Saudi Government wishes to engage with the global community through knowledge exchange and research jointly with the World Bank, one of its valued knowledge partners. The report acknowledges that integrating a digital transformation agenda and a digital sustainability agenda at the level of an entire country is a significant undertaking. KSA is moving in this direction and has started collecting experiences while dealing with legacy business ways rooted in culture, structure, and traditions. Therefore, these experiences represent the beginning of the process, not the result. By sharing these experiences and collecting new ones from other countries, the hope is to enable a stable integration of sustainable goals in the digital development agenda across the globe to the benefit of people and society.