Assessment of Smart Transfor-mations of Territorial Communities in Poltava Region under Post-War Recovery Conditions

The article provides an indicative assessment of smart transformations of territorial communities in Poltava region under post-war recovery conditions. The study substantiates the expediency of considering digital transformation as a necessary but insufficient prerequisite for smart development, which requires integration with economic modernisation, institutional strengthening, and partnership-based mechanisms. The methodological framework is based on the use of the Digital Transformation Index of territorial communities/regions of Ukraine as an analytical proxy for assessing the level of digital maturity and the preconditions for smart transformations at the local level. A combination of ranking, component-based, quartile and interquartile range (IQR) analysis is applied, enabling the identification of spatial asymmetry in digital development, structural imbalances among digitalisation components, and the formation of a typology of community smart profiles. The results reveal a pronounced polarisation of the digital space, characterised by the emergence of a relatively narrow core of digitally capable communities and a wide group of territories with low and medium levels of digital transformation. It is shown that the dominance of administrative and service-oriented digitalisation in the absence of sufficient development of the digital economy constrains the conversion of digital efforts into sustainable socio-economic effects. Based on the findings, the paper justifies the transition from uniform digitalisation programmes to differentiated smart transformation support instruments tailored to specific community smart profiles. Particular attention is paid to the role of public–private and international public–private partnerships as institutional mechanisms for accelerating smart transformations in the post-war period.