Denmark

• Money and building: each year the government and KL, the municipalities’ association, agree a budget frame for all 98, by agreement rather than by law. For 2027 it caps their combined construction spending at DKK 22.3bn.
• Broadband: private and co-operative operators build the networks. A rural council can co-fund residents’ bids to the state’s broadband pool: in the 2024 round, councils did so for 43 of the 93 projects, which were promised support for 1,135 addresses.
• Transport and roads: since the 2007 reform municipalities buy local bus services and own about 68,000 of the 72,000 km of public road. Regional transport companies run fares and timetables; the state runs the railways.
• Policing and cameras: the police are national, under the Police Act. They bought POL-INTEL, an analysis system built on Palantir software, in 2017, and a town has no say over it.
• Energy and heat: under the Heat Supply Act the councils carry out heat planning, and about two homes in three are on district heating. The power grid’s operator, Energinet, is state-owned.
• Planning and the coast: local plans and building permits are municipal, the building regulations national. Under the Coastal Protection Act (Kystbeskyttelsesloven) a council may charge the owners who benefit from a sea defence for part of its cost.
• Open data: the basic registers of addresses, buildings and maps are national. In 2019 the National Audit Office counted 921 open state datasets spread over 88 places, and found that several ministries had no overview of their own.
• e-ID and online services: MitID is owned jointly by the Agency for Digital Government (Digitaliseringsstyrelsen) and the banks, through their association Finans Danmark. The agency also runs Digital Post, which its own law makes compulsory. The town hall cannot opt out, and it must serve the people who cannot use them.
• Procurement and shared IT: EU and Danish procurement law, the Udbudsloven of 2015, applies to every town. KOMBIT, the municipalities’ own IT company, provides 30 nationwide systems, and SKI runs joint purchasing deals for the state and municipalities.
• Climate targets: the Climate Act binds the state, not the municipalities. Every council’s climate plan is voluntary.

A small town gets the same tools as the capital. Its residents log in with MitID and read their Digital Post through borger.dk, like everyone else’s. Heat is the lever the councils hold most firmly, because they plan it themselves.

Going alone is what is hard. Construction money is capped for all 98 together, and core case systems are bought once for everyone. Five joint IT-service organisations, plus Copenhagen’s own, are set up by 1 January 2027 and take over the councils’ servers and networks by the end of that year. The most contested uses of data are national, so arguments a city official abroad might expect at a town hall take place in ministries.

Three collectives do much of the towns’ work for them. KL negotiates for all 98 and co-signs the national digital strategy; since March 2026 its chair has been Peter Rahbæk Juel, the Social Democratic mayor of Odense. KOMBIT buys their systems. Realdania, a philanthropic foundation, launched the municipalities’ shared climate-planning programme in 2019. The fibre belongs largely to utilities and co-operatives.

The watchdogs are national too: the National Audit Office (Rigsrevisionen), the Climate Council, the Parliamentary Ombudsman and the Danish Institute for Human Rights. Outside the state, IT-Politisk Forening, a digital-rights association, follows surveillance bills, and Amnesty International has examined the welfare agency’s algorithms.

From our library

Coded Injustice: Surveillance and Discrimination in Denmark's automated welfare state (EUR 18/8709/2024)

Amnesty’s report on the fraud-control models of the national benefits agency.

Read more →

Mette Frederiksen of the Social Democrats began her third term as prime minister on 3 June 2026, after the election of 24 March. Her minority coalition adds the Green Left (SF), a left-wing party, the Moderates and the Social Liberals (Radikale Venstre), a centrist party, to her own: 82 of the 179 seats. Samira Nawa of the Social Liberals is the climate minister.

The separate digital ministry created in 2022 became part of a portfolio for research, education and digitalisation under Christina Egelund of the Moderates. In 2018, for Liberal Alliance, she withdrew the backing that ended Gladsaxe’s child-risk project.

From our library

Hvorfor Gladsaxemodellen fejlede – om anvendelse af algoritmer på socialt udsatte børn (Kenneth Kristensen, SiS vol. 37 no. 1, 2022)

Why Gladsaxe’s child-risk project was shelved, in a peer-reviewed account.

Read more →

Digital policy is written jointly by the state, KL and the regions. Their seventh joint strategy, for 2026–2029, has 12 initiatives, from help for people who struggle online to digital sovereignty. The document sets no budget and no measurable targets.

Compulsory Digital Post was presented as saving about DKK 1bn a year. In 2016 the National Audit Office found that the state had cut its agencies’ budgets by only DKK 48m of the DKK 244m it had calculated for itself. The parliament’s auditors said the full saving had not been substantiated.

From our library

Beretning om besparelsespotentialet ved obligatorisk Digital Post på ca. 1 mia. kr. om året (Rigsrevisionen 9/2015)

Audit reveals promised 1 billion‑kr annual digital‑post savings lack evidence, questioning e‑government claims.

Read more →

The AI programmes tell the same story. A national fund supported 40 AI “signature projects” in municipalities and regions in 2020–22. By their 2024 evaluation, 6 were in operation, 16 had ended without going live and 18 were still running; an unclear legal basis and poor data were the main reasons. Three national large-scale AI projects followed in December 2025, and the June 2026 coalition has promised an AI acceleration fund to roll out promising solutions.

The 2027 budget agreement promises one general legal basis for AI-supported decisions. In August 2026 the Parliamentary Ombudsman asked the ministry to account for the three projects, using his power to open general investigations.

From our library

Aftale om kommunernes økonomi for 2027

The yearly deal between the state and the 98 municipalities that caps their building and pools their IT.

Read more →

Denmark’s recovery plan holds €1,626m in EU grants, 27% of it for digital aims. On 30 June 2026 the Commission found that Denmark had met every milestone of its plan, the first member state to do so. On 24 July it authorised the fifth and final payment of €359m. Aarhus, Copenhagen and Sønderborg are the EU’s Mission cities for climate neutrality in Denmark, and all three hold its label.

On sovereignty the state has moved in both directions at once. In June 2025 the digital minister announced a trial of the open-source office suite LibreOffice in her ministry. By December, 38 staff were testing it, with frustration, and it was to continue for months; no result has been published. Meanwhile the state renewed its Microsoft licences for DKK 4.2bn over five years.

The state’s own algorithms draw the hardest criticism. Since 2013 Udbetaling Danmark, a national agency, has paid pensions, family benefits, maternity pay and housing benefit in place of the municipalities. With the pension fund ATP it runs up to 60 fraud-control models, according to Amnesty International. One, “Model Abroad”, flags “medium and high-strength ties” to countries outside the European Economic Area. The agency says its processing is legally grounded.

Police facial recognition is the second front. In February 2024 the Danish Institute for Human Rights, the national human-rights body, said there was “no clear legal basis” for it. A political agreement that year widened police use for serious crime without a dedicated law, which by November 2025 had still not been written.

Copenhagen’s residents, at least, seem less troubled. In IMD’s 2026 survey of how residents see their city, 74.6% there said they were comfortable with face recognition to lower crime. That is more than in Berlin (71.8%), London (68.4%) or Paris (66.4%).

In Sønderborg, ProjectZero, a public–private partnership, measures the area’s emissions against 2007, and its 2025 accounts show them 79% lower. The next accounts, for 2026, are due in July 2027.

DK2020 took a different route. Realdania launched it in 2019 with C40, the global network of cities, the think tank CONCITO, KL and the regions, to bring C40’s planning method to the municipalities. By the end of 2024, 95 plans had come out of it, alongside Copenhagen’s own, and Glostrup adopted its plan in April 2025.

From our library

Status på kommunernes klimahandling — Etablering af Klimaalliancens fælles monitoreringssystem (april 2025)

How far the municipalities’ voluntary climate plans have got, measured to one standard.

Read more →

The plans aim for 76% below 1990 by 2030, but their measures add up to 73%. Municipal emissions in the national energy and carbon accounts fell from 47 to 38 Mt between 2018 and 2022, almost a fifth.

OS2, the municipalities’ open-source partnership, carries software the same way. Copenhagen, Ballerup, Sønderborg, Syddjurs and Ishøj founded it in 2012. An undated EU case study counted 20 of its products in use 394 times across the 98, maintained by 136 people from 48 municipalities, but gives no figure for the saving.

Syddjurs’s FleetOptimiser, which plans the use of municipal vehicles, was one of the 40 nationally funded signature projects. By 2024 it had been scaled to 12 organisations; no saving has been published.

Aarhus is trying the next step on its own. Its 2026 budget aims for at least a quarter of its office software to be open source by 2030, expecting a net saving of DKK 7m a year from 2029. Its culture and citizens’ services department has moved 60 systems from Microsoft’s Azure cloud to Hetzner, a German host, at a third of the price. The national strategy cites the move as its example of digital sovereignty, and Odsherred is studying the same.

From our library

Sammen griber vi de digitale muligheder — Den fællesoffentlige digitaliseringsstrategi 2026-2029

The state, municipalities and regions’ joint digital strategy for 2026–2029.

Read more →

Odense’s light rail opened in 2022 with a business case of 9.8m passengers a year. It carried 5.8m in 2023, above a forecast cut to 5.3m that August, and just under 7.4m in 2025. The company said it was short DKK 58m for 2023 and 89m for 2024.

“If we do not reach 9.8 million next year, the municipality must pay the difference,” said Christoffer Lilleholt of Venstre, a liberal party, then Odense’s alderman for employment and social affairs, in January 2024.

Gladsaxe asked to go first and was stopped. In 2017 it applied for a frikommune (“free municipality”) exemption to combine health, address and other data to flag children at risk. The interior ministry refused that December, yet the government cited the idea in its 2018 plan against “parallel societies”. In December 2018 four PCs were stolen from the town hall, one holding about 20,000 civil registration numbers.

The leak had no direct connection to the project, but the press linked the two, and Liberal Alliance, then a governing party, withdrew its support. The project was shelved in early 2019 while still in development.

Vejle’s coast needs the state. Its town and harbour are among the first five areas in a DKK 900m national package for storm-surge defences; “the municipality cannot carry the costs alone”, its committee chair said. In October 2025 it was starting the first of three phases, to protect 7.8 km of shore by 2030.

A single Danish town goes first when the risk stays at home: Sønderborg with its carbon accounts, Aarhus with its servers, Odense with a light rail whose shortfall it pays. What reached nearly every town was built for all of them from the start. 97 of the 98 now have climate plans to C40’s method, at least 95 of them made through DK2020, and OS2’s code is in use 394 times. Gladsaxe needed the state’s permission to go first, and did not get it.