An open data index to assess the green transition - A study on all Italian municipalities

This study introduces a municipality transition index based on open data and green transition principles. The Municipality Transition Index provides data and a succinct measurement of municipal attributes as defined by green policies at national and local level. We identify four dimensions of interest and 18 key performance indicators, defined at municipality level, and measure factors that directly and indirectly influence the green transition, with a focus on the Green Deal vision embraced by the European Union. The robustness and meaningfulness of the index is tested on a dataset covering all 7904 Italian municipalities. Our results show that computation of the MTI on this sample produces a bell-shaped distribution, suggesting strong geographic disparities and a significant difference between cities, towns and rural areas. The results show the need for policies and tools tailored at municipal level and provide information for practitioners, policy makers and experts from academia, useful for designing tools to underpin investment planning in the framework of the recent National Recovery and Resilience Plan issued by the Italian government. This may be particularly useful for enhancing green-transition-enabling factors that may differ across regions, helping policymakers to promote a smooth and fair transition by monitoring the performance of municipalities as they address the challenge.