Digital Governance Transformation in Rural Areas: A Strategic Framework for Sustainable Public Services in the Society 5.0 Era

The transition to Society 5.0 offers rural governance a chance to overcome persistent geographic and bureaucratic barriers by shifting from manual processes to human-centric cyber-physical systems. This study proposes a strategic framework for sustainable digital governance in rural areas by integrating the System Development Life Cycle within a Design Science Research approach. The framework centers on mobile-based self-service modules and real-time community asset mapping (including livestock, crops, and land ownership) to reduce spatial marginalization and enable location-independent access to public services. It outlines a service-oriented, mobile-first, offline-capable architecture that supports G2C, G2G, and C2C interactions, including a digital marketplace and complaint reporting. Empirical implementation demonstrates significant reductions in transaction and travel costs, enhanced administrative efficiency, and improved citizen satisfaction. The results also show that synchronizing legal and institutional mechanisms, such as digital signatures and national ID integration, is critical to preventing innovation intermittency and ensuring long-term sustainability of rural digital governance.