A key challenge behind the adoption of blockchain in the public sector is understanding the dynamics of blockchain governance. Based on a systematic literature review, this article analyzes different approaches to blockchain governance across disciplines and develops a comprehensive conceptual framework for the study of blockchain governance decisions in the public sector. The framework clusters nine types of governance decisions (infrastructure architecture, application architecture, interoperability, decision-making mechanism, incentive mechanism, consensus mechanism, organization of governance, accountability of governance, and control of governance) into three levels of analysis (micro, meso, and macro-levels). Drawing on public management theories and concepts, the article elucidates the implications of various governance choices in each level of governance and provides a primer for researchers and policy practitioners on the design of blockchain-based systems in the public sector.
Information and Communication Technology (ICT) is often thought of as a uniformly positive tool making governments more transparent, accountable, and less corrupt. However, the evidence on it is mixed and often misunderstood. Hence, this article carries out a systematic stocktaking of ICT toolsâ impact on corruption, offering a nuanced and context-dependent assessment. The tools reviewed are digital public services, crowdsourcing platforms, whistleblowing tools, transparency portals, distributed ledger technology, and artificial intelligence. We scrutinise the evidence both on ICTsâ anticorruption effectiveness and misuse for corruption. Drawing on the commonalities across technologies, we find that ICT can support anti-corruption by impacting public scrutiny in numerous ways: enabling reporting on corruption, promoting transparency and accountability, facilitating citizen participation and government-citizen interactions. However, ICT can also provide new corruption opportunities through the dark web, cryptocurrencies, or the misuse of technologies such as centralised databases. The introduction of ICT tools does not automatically translate into anti-corruption outcomes; rather, impact hinges on the matching between ICT tools and the local context, including support for and skills in using technology.
It is widely argued that Blockchain Technology (BCT) is one of the most promising trends nowadays. The most prominent characteristic of this technology is the improved sense of trust to the shared information provided by BCT applications as well as the ubiquitous access to the data ledger. At the same time governments pursue amplified trust from their citizens increasing transparency through shared information and open data. Since BCT supports this strategic goal of governments worldwide, numerous governments try to capitalize on the advances of this technology through testing the results of pilot applications in different vertical governmental sectors. Even though there are several implementations in the Government sector, there is no comprehensive study towards the analysis of the major characteristics of these developments. This paper moves towards the fulfillment of this gap by conducting a thorough analysis of e-Government pilot applications of BCT at a European level providing information to policymakers and practitioners about the grey areas of this technology.
Blockchain technology and New Public Governance (NPG) represent promising concepts for various researchers. As such, both concepts offer the vision of an altered relationship between public administration and its non-public actors by emphasizing a strong position of non-public actors for public service delivery. This research aims to identify the relevance of NPG to leading blockchain implementations in the European public sector. For this purpose, both topics are combined in an explorative analysis. The analysis leverages an adapted analysis framework designed for this research effort to structure the expectations around NPG. Qualitative interviews with multiple key stakeholders of blockchain implementations projects were conducted to understand the actual impact of blockchain on the actor's relationships for public service delivery. This article presents the findings to this question and concludes that the use of blockchain has the changed actor relationships only in parts. Consequently, the author finally draws attention to the importance of blockchain governance and blockchain regulation for further developing the relationships of public administrations and their non-public counterparts.
Rafael Ziolkowski, Gianluca Miscione, Gerhard Schwabe
In recent years, scholarly interest research on blockchain technology steadily increased. While the underlying technology matures, observed problems in the field show questions of governance to remain crucial, even though scarcely studied empirically. One approach of solving these problems can be seen in decentralized autonomous organizations, which describes a new type of organizing that is grounded on consensus-based, distributed autonomy. The governance peculiarities of DAOs is fairly unexplored, and this is where this research commences. In an exploratory multiple case study consisting of three popular DAOs Aragon, Tezos, and DFINITY, their governance peculiarities are worked out by analyzing grey literature to understand stakeholder interests, incentivization, control, and coordination mechanisms, technical considerations, and external influences from off-chain entities. In the context of an on-and-off-chain continuum, it appears that DAOs provide mechanisms that might enable autonomous decision-making but, at the same time, find themselves strongly influenced by the interests of various stakeholders.
Thays A. Oliveira, Miquel Oliver, Helena Ramalhinho
The way citizens interact with cities affects overall life quality. Their participation in social decisions is of paramount importance for helping on public decisions that affect governance, regulation and education. This interaction has the potential of being boosted within the scope of smart and digital cities, especially by recent advances in blockchain technology. This work introduces insights about how smart citiesâ concepts and innovative technologies can help society to face daily challenges for improving citizensâ awareness. Digital technologies are able to drive social and economic development by employing Information and Communication Technology (ICT) to promote innovation. In this context, e-governance, in conjunction with disruptive concepts such as blockchain, is showing up as a fundamental tool for a decentralized democracy. This study reviews, discusses, raises open points and presents suggestions towards an efficient, transparent and sustainable use of technology, applied to future cities.
E-government provides access to services anytime anywhere. There are many e-Government frameworks already exist to integrate e-government services, but efficient full interoperability still a challenge. Interoperability per se can be modeled via four maturity stages, in which the interoperability zone is the holy grail of full interoperability to be reached ultimately with strategy alignment. As e-government services shift in the same way as e-commerce with value chain, this implicitly implies the possibility of benefiting from blockchain with e-government. Blockchain is a nascent promising architecture, whose transactions are permanent, verifiable, and recorded in a distributed ledger. This research article suggests applying blockchain in achieving e- government interoperability. Forms are juxtaposed on the outer borders of the system. These forms adopt those used by UK government, because they are standard as well as they are available for Python developers. Once a form has been completed, PySOA calls the requested service, before storing the data in Ontology Blockchain. After the service is performed, the policies are analyzed in batch processing using quantgov. A report is submitted to the central government periodically. Ontology Blockchain has a dual effect. On the one hand, it works as a secure data storage. On the other hand, it cooperates with PySOA in supporting both technology and semantic interoperability . The most important feature of the proposed method is the presence of (Government Interoperability Zone Alignment; GIZA), which acts as a backbone that coherently connects the internal subcomponents. This linkage is possible, because each form has an title, that corresponds to the appropriate service name. Each service in turn has a counterpart in the wallets stored in Ontology blockchain. To measure interoperability empirically, there is a need for metrics. This study adopts and quantizes a standard interoperability matrix along three dimensions of interoperability of Conceptual (Syntax& Semantics), Organizational (Responsibilities& Organization per se), and Technology (Platform& Communication). While concerns are : data, business, service, and process. Any deviation from the standard could contributes to the interoperability score (counting mismatches) or interoperability grade (counting absolute differences). An estimation is performed, for 1000 total random cases. It is estimated that the probability of getting a conceptual/technical interoperability score as large as the standard strategy score is (713 /1000 = 0.713 (2 in 3). It is estimated too that the probability of getting a organizational interoperability score as large as the standard strategy score is (712 /1000 = 0.712 (2 in 3). Then, Markov model is proposed to provide an accurate representation of the evolution of the strategies over time.
Carlos Eduardo Tofanim, Gabriel Moralo da Costa, Jean Paul Pezzutti, Matheus Casarin Giaculi
This study investigates the feasibility of applying blockchain technology to enhance the security and transparency of electronic voting systems. The research analyzes potential vulnerabilities and trust challenges associated with traditional electronic voting infrastructure and explores how distributed ledger technologies can be used to improve vote integrity and auditability. A prototype voting system was developed to simulate an online voting environment using blockchain as the underlying data storage mechanism. The system was implemented as a web application using ASP.NET MVC and C# within the .NET Framework environment, with blockchain functionality integrated through an open-source implementation adapted for the study. The prototype demonstrates how votes can be recorded as blockchain transactions, ensuring immutability and distributed verification of voting data. The architecture also includes a web-based user interface for vote selection and confirmation, as well as backend blockchain validation mechanisms responsible for maintaining the integrity of the distributed ledger. The study evaluates the technical feasibility of integrating blockchain with electronic voting processes and discusses potential advantages such as improved transparency, tamper resistance, and decentralized validation of election results. Although the study focuses primarily on the technical feasibility and proof-of-concept implementation, the findings suggest that blockchain-based voting systems could represent a promising approach for improving trust and security in digital electoral systems. Future research directions include scalability analysis, infrastructure requirements for nationwide implementation, and mechanisms for secure voter verification.
This article introduces the concept of âplace-based civic techâ â citizen engagement technology co- designed by local government, civil society and global volunteers. It investigates to what extent creating such a digital space for autonomous self-organization allows for the emergence of a parallel, self-determining and more place-based geography of politics and political action. It finds that combining online tools with offline collaborative practices presents a unique opportunity for decentralization of power and decision-making in a manner which both politically motivates civil society and begins to update the infrastructure of democracy. The discussion is supported by a combination of primary and secondary data, with research methods including ethnographic and participatory observation techniques. Research data is drawn from a range of empirical sources, including an in-depth case study of the radical municipalist movement in Spain. The article concludes that there is a clear and compelling narrative of cities taking power back, in the form of a plural and globally networked movement. As such, this study contributes to both the theory and practice of civic tech, collective impact, municipalism and place-based urban politics while emphasizing the need for further research on experiments and movements currently existing below the academic radar. <br/>
Open access
Innovative Approaches in Technology and Social Development
David Allessie, Maciej Sobolewski, Lorenzino Vaccari
In less than ten years from its advent in 2008, the concept of distributed ledgers has entered into mainstream research and policy agendas. Enthusiastic reception, fuelled by the success of Bitcoin and the explosion of potential use cases created high, if not hyped, expectations with respect to the transformative role of blockchain for the industry and the public sector. Growing experimentation with distributed ledgers and the emergence of the first operational implementations provide an opportunity to go beyond hype and speculation based on theoretical use cases. This report looks at the ongoing exploration of blockchain technology by governments. The analysis of a group of pioneering developments of public services shows that blockchain technology can reduce bureaucracy, increase the efficiency of administrative processes and increase the level of trust in public recordkeeping. Based on the state-of-art developments, blockchain has not yet demonstrated to be either transformative or even disruptive an innovation for governments as it is sometimes portrayed. Ongoing projects bring incremental rather than fundamental changes to the operational capacities of governments. Nevertheless some of them offer clear value for citizens. Technological and ecosystem maturity of distributed ledgers have to increase in order to unlock the transformative power of blockchain. Policy agenda should focus on non-technological barriers, such as incompatibility between blockchain-based solutions and existing legal and organizational frameworks. This principal policy goal cannot be achieved by adapting technology to legacy systems. It requires using the transformative power of blockchain to be used to create new processes, organizations, structures and standards. Hence, policy support should stimulate more experimentation with both the technology and new administrative processes that can be re-engineered for blockchain.
Blockchain Technology is considered as a general-purpose technology with far reaching effects. As can be seen from the discussions on blockchain applications, both practitioners and researchers struggle to get to the core of blockchain technology consequences. Especially practitioners in the governmental sector explore adequate responses to this new technology. Therefore, our aim is to provide a conceptualization of the consequences of blockchain systems from an institutional perspective, and to use this conceptualization to provide insights into the governance of blockchain systems.
The aim of this chapter is to situate blockchain-based governance tools within a public value (PV) context, arguing that public governance on the blockchain requires elements of a âpublic value mindset,â which is comprised of transparency, efficiency, stakeholder salience and participation, innovative thinking, decentralization, and trust. To illustrate this PV mindset, the chapter analogizes the powerful solution put forth by cryptocurrencies towards the âdouble spending problem,â an issue that had once plagued electronic money, by arguing that the manner in which the double-spending problem was solved by blockchain technology (as best embodied by cryptocurrencies) also offers lessons for public governance on the blockchain, specifically in terms of the PV elements enumerated above. By elucidating the nature of the double-spending problem and the revolutionary solution offered by cryptocurrencies, the chapter advocates for a similar approach in the application of blockchain technologies to public management and governance.
Abstract During the last decade, the development of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) has led the world into a new era of innovative technologies that can provide effective responses to human concerns. In developed countries, the profitability motivation has imposed ServiceâOriented Architectures (SOA) in enterprises as a better way to design information systems capable of taking into account interâorganizational cooperation mechanisms while preserving autonomy of the latter. Those ServiceâOriented Architectures did not stop at the doors of public administrations. Thus, several specifications have been made to adapt them to the peculiarities of public governance. But these models are not always able to respond effectively to the concerns of governments in developing countries particularly when they are structurally and territorially decentralized. Therefore, we propose a more suitable model to this type of eâgovernance. We will later see how our model can be more suitable for the organization of remote and secured fairground courts in Cameroon to address constraints related to finance, time and security that these courts currently impose.
THE IDEA THAT WE AREâor should beâmoving from an âindustrial age governmentâ to an âinformation age governmentâ is a staple of political rhetoric. But has the information age significantly altered government in the liberal democracies? And if it has not yet done so, should we expect the liberal state to change in any fundamental way, or be entirely replaced, because of the chain of consequences set in motion by new technology? Since the early development of computers, there have been, broadly speaking, three phases in thinking about the potential of new technology to improve government. Beginning in the 1950s, the application of digital technology to the public sector was conceived of as automation and the hope was mainly for greater efficiency and control in governmental operations. A second phase, dating from the 1980s and rising to a climax in the following decade, pitted two alternative visions against each otherâprivatization and reinventionâeach premised on the idea that the information age made traditional forms of public administration obsolete. Finally, in the most recent phase, digital democracy has become a central theme of visions of new forms of governance based on the diffusion of cheap computing and online communication. Each of these phases has brought some notable but far from revolutionary achievements, and that is what we should continue to expect. Digital technology does enhance some features of democratic government, but the fundamental problems of democracy are not susceptible to technological solutions, and the same developments that strengthen some democratic capacities degrade others. In this new environment, it will be a struggle just to maintain some of the minimal conditions of political accountability that democracy requires. The U.S. federal government, particularly the military, was initially a leader in the development of computers, and from World War II to the 1960s, the state stood on the frontier of information technology. The application of computers to the public sector raised expectations not of radical change but of doing what government agencies already did, only faster and more cheaplyâthat is, automating the bureaucratic status quo. Top-down control and economy of administration were the primary purposes of computerization. Computers were supposed to cut paperwork and costs, reduce crime, and give managers and policymakers better information. The pursuit of control is at the core of bureaucratic administration. Bureaucracy is ideally supposed to ensure adherence to rules through such means as hierarchical command, specialization of functions, uniformity of procedure, and formal documentation. By limiting individual discretion, these elements of bureaucracy are supposed to increase the capacity of the state to carry out whatever purposes animate it. Democracy, far from being antithetical to bureaucracy, has often stimulated its growth. Scandals regularly prompt demand for new rules. The progressives who brought America the popular referendum and direct election of senators also introduced unified budgetary control and stricter rules about the award of government jobs and contracts. They sought as well to professionalize administration and make it more scientific. Computerization fit the progressive bureaucratic paradigm perfectly. The introduction of computers in the 1950s and 1960s coincided with budgetary reform efforts that were intended to give chief executives and their finance officers greater control over how money was spent. Computerization offered the promise of achieving the elusive fiscal goals of unified control and accurate cost accounting for public services. The very nature of early mainframe computers seemed to dictate centralized control, although line agencies fought to get their own computers. Thus, the most widely anticipated effect of computers on government was the centralization of power. Greater executive control over the bureaucracy was an explicit reform objective, but many critics feared that computerization would augment the state's dominion over the individual, and this concern focused the attention on privacy protection. These anxieties were hardly unreasonable. At all levels, government was oriented not to the computerization of service but to the computerization of constraintâthat is, to computerizing functions such as police, revenue collection, and motor vehicle licensing. Within the service agencies, computerization chiefly involved functions in back offices such as record keeping. The âbackstageâ locus of automation concerned both supporters, who thought the public might not appreciate the value of computers, and critics, who thought the public might fail to appreciate the threat to privacy. The early decades of computerization did bear positive fruit. The mid-twentieth century saw enormous growth in government, and after 1955, computers helped public agencies cope with the sheer increase in transactions. Despite the rise in federal expenditures in the United States, the number of federal civilian employees fell; productivity gains from computerization helped to make that possible. But by the 1980s, new developments in both politics and information technology led to a dramatic turn in thinking. Instead of improving bureaucracy, the goal became overthrowing it. The rise of conservative antigovernment sentiment in the Reagan era coincided with a shift in the relationship of government to technological change. The private sector had now moved into the forefront in the use of information technology. In 1983, a Reagan administration commission was stating the obvious when it declared that although the federal government in the 1960s had been âthe acknowledged leader in using state-of-the-art computer hardware and software,â the government had fallen âfarther and farther behind.â The technological lag of the public sector was particularly evident at government's front endâthat is, where the public had direct contact with government. By this time, businesses were using telecommunications and information technology to improve customer service and produce a wider array of products tailored to different tastes; consumers had become used to the convenience of automated teller machines (ATMs), credit cards, and free, round-the-clock calls to 800 numbers. By comparison, public agencies were far slower to take up the new possibilities. The shift from mainframes to minicomputers and the rise of personal computers also turned earlier assumptions upside down; instead of favoring centralized control, the new technology could be a means of decentralization. Conservatives and liberals responded to this situation in different ways. To conservatives, the failure of government to keep up with information technology confirmed the need for privatization. As many corporations were outsourcing specialized functions, so government should do the sameâindeed, the state should generally cut back its size and role. The information revolution thereby provided a legitimizing rhetoric for policies that conservatives had long favored for other reasons. To liberals, the logical response to public sector lag was not to privatize government but to âreinventâ it by making public agencies more flexible in organization, more focused on results rather than procedures, and more responsive to âcustomers.â The Clinton administration's National Performance Review, led by Al Gore, embodied this approach and linked it to the information revolution. In the same period as this debate was playing out, the Internet was becoming a popular medium, and the vision of a reinvented state increasingly emphasized the use of online communication in making government more customer friendly. The focus on improving government at the point of contact with the public involved more than a pretty new interface; electronic access offered the promise of better integrated and more consistently delivered services. But besides improving government's output, the Internet also awakened an interest in giving citizens more input. And with the development of the Web and tools built on it, that interest has gained traction. Digital media have unquestionably expanded the democratic repertoire. Political campaigns and social movements now have cheap, instant means of communication that circumvent the established mass media, and they can use those resources to mobilize followers, coordinate their activity, and aggregate contributions of money, labor, and knowledge. The successful use of new media in politics has raised expectations about its use in government, particularly for three purposesâincreased transparency, collaboration, and participation. Transparency is the most readily achievable of these goals. Just as some early advocates of âteledemocracyâ envisioned, the Internet now provides instant access to government documents and data, and allows the public to track legislation and regulatory decisions. The idea of transparency has grown, moreover, into the notion of government as a âplatformâ that routinely makes granular data available in a form that enables others to build applications on top of it. Here, the goal of open government moves from transparency to collaboration and participation, which raise more difficult questions. Other ideas along these lines call for crowdsourcing proposals for government action and putting such proposals up for electronic voting. The further one moves along the spectrum of actions from transparency to participation, the more vexed the idea of digital democracy becomes. Even though the digital divide has narrowed, any reliance of government on digital technology will put people with less income and education at an inequitable disadvantage because of persistent differences in digital skill as well as access. Moreover, where online participation is opened up, highly committed minorities and special interests are likely to dominate. In a crowdsourcing initiative after the election, the Obama transition effort invited the public to submit and vote on ideas, but the results were embarrassing. As the New York Times reported, âIn the middle of two wars and an economic meltdown, the highest-ranking idea was to legalize marijuana, an idea nearly twice as popular as repealing the Bush tax cuts on the wealthy. Legalizing online poker topped the technology ideas.â Conceived this way, digital democracy recapitulates the classic problems of direct democracyâskewed participation and lack of deliberation. Other difficulties with the idea of revitalizing democracy through online communication arise from the indirect effects of new media on traditional mechanisms of political accountability. By providing an alternative platform for advertising as well as news, the Internet has undercut the sources of newspaper revenue, plunging journalism into a deep crisis and weakening the ability of the press to keep watch on government, particularly at the state and local levels. Resources for journalism are now disappearing from the old media faster than the new media can create them. Furthermore, newspapers have assembled a broad public, including many people who have bought a paper for the sports or crossword puzzle but nonetheless scanned the front page and learned something about the news of their community and the world. Online, however, they can go to a sports or puzzle site without any exposure to the news. In the early years of television, when the evening news was on all three available channels, the national news had a similarly broad public. But beginning with cable television, the advent of new media has brought a profusion of choices of different kinds of entertainment. The share of the public who regularly follows the news and public affairs has declined, though those with the most interest in politics (usually people with strong partisan commitments) have access to more news and a wider range of opinions than before. Despite the cornucopia of information, the politically attentive public has diminished and become more sharply divided along ideological lines. The gains for democracy from new technology are real, but unfortunately, so are the losses. It may be a long time before we can add them up and determine the net impact. In each phase, early enthusiasms have run up against stubborn and uncomfortable limits, even as new democratic possibilities have opened up. We are still in the midst of tremendous ferment in technology, media, and politics, and the creativity now being unleashed is our best hope that when the digital revolution finally runs its course, free societies and popular self-government will be left standing.
Implementing the African Information Society Initiative (AISI), African Ministers of Planning and Economic Development identified the use of ICTs in central Government and local administration as one of the priority sectors for the entry of Africa into the information era and as a means to support Governmentâs administration and decentralization process, which is consistent with Vision 2020 in developing electronic information for development in the Gambia.
Responding to a request from the Hon. Secretary of State for Finance and Economic Affairs, of the Republic of The Gambia, The Executive Secretary of United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) sent a mission to the Gambia in November 2002 to carryout a preliminary assessment and discuss modalities for the design of e-Government Strategy for the Gambia with a view to start an e-Government pilot project between the Department of State for Finance and Economic Affairs and the Office of The President for the sharing of Financial and Economic Management data and information. It is envisaged that after the successful implementation of the pilot project, all the relevant institutions and services across the country will be subsequently interconnected electronically.