The social and cultural shaping of cybersecurity capacity building: a comparative study of nations and regions

This paper evaluates national cybersecurity capacity building, with a focus on the social and cultural factors that shape overall cybersecurity maturity. The authors conduct a study across 78 nations using the Cybersecurity Capacity Maturity Model for Nations (CMM), a widely recognized framework for assessing national cybersecurity capabilities. Drawing on elements of the CMM, they define the Social and Cultural Dimension (SCD)—a single metric that captures a nation’s cybersecurity capacity through a social and cultural lens. The study finds that while regional differences in cybersecurity capacity exist, these differences are largely accounted for by national factors such as economic development, Internet penetration, democratic history, corruption control, and regulatory quality. In particular, nations with higher GDP per capita, greater Internet access, longer-standing democracies, stronger corruption control, and more effective regulatory systems tend to exhibit higher levels of cybersecurity maturity. Additionally, the authors suggest that investing in the social and cultural aspects of cybersecurity may offer a more cost-effective approach to capacity building compared to purely technical interventions.