Institutional Learnability in Sustainable Smart Region Governance: The Act/Remember Gap in Community Knowledge-Building

Abstract

Smart city and smart region governance increasingly relies on data-informed decision-making, stakeholder participation, digital tools, and public feedback. However, these mechanisms do not automatically create institutional learning. This article examines sustainable smart region governance as an institutional learnability problem and asks whether participation, local knowledge, and feedback are converted into adaptive action and retained as institutional memory. The study applies a Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses extension for Scoping Reviews (PRISMA-ScR)-informed structured evidence mapping combined with an embedded regional case diagnosis from the Tokaj Wine Region, Hungary. The analysis integrates the literature on smart governance, learning regions, higher education quality assurance, territorial resilience, and adaptive governance with regional governance observation materials, stakeholder survey data, coding tables, calculation workbooks, and analytical figures deposited in a public Figshare dataset. The results identify the Act/Remember gap as the central learning-cycle disruption. Planning, implementation, monitoring, and consultation may be present, but feedback often fails to become adaptive action, and action is weakly retained as institutional memory. The comparison with higher education quality assurance shows that structured feedback and continuous improvement principles are transferable only as learning logic, not as procedural models. The findings also show that single-profile territories are especially vulnerable to delayed learning, strategic lock-in, and weak community knowledge-building. The article contributes to smart governance research by proposing institutional learnability as a diagnostic capacity of sustainable smart regions. It argues that digital tools should function as learning infrastructure supporting traceability, feedback-to-action mechanisms, and institutional memory, rather than as substitutes for human deliberation, trust, and collective responsibility.