This paper proposes Platform-Enabled People Governance (PEPG), a conceptual model of public governance organized around public problems rather than around a single institution, bureaucracy, or digital platform. PEPG places a public problem at the center and connects citizens, experts, government institutions, implementers, funders, contractors, and oversight actors through distributed participation spaces. The model distinguishes open public participation in problem identification and solution development from controlled participation in implementation and formal oversight. PEPG is platform-agnostic. WhatsApp, Telegram, X, GitHub, dedicated government systems, or other digital environments may serve as participation spaces without becoming the governance model itself. The paper also discusses transparency, independent oversight, contracts, legislative inputs, tamper-evident records, blockchain as an optional integrity layer, institutional capacity, decision-making speed, prevention of concentration and capture, and safeguards against external influence. This publication represents an early conceptual formulation of PEPG and is intended to support further academic discussion, critique, experimentation, and development.
This chapter discusses the growing challenges faced by cities as their population continues to grow and citizen services become more and more complex and interconnected. It argues that many of the inefficiencies and mistrust are not because of a lack of digitization of urban services, but because of fragmented data, agencies operating in silos, and a lack of transparency in government processes. With that in mind, the chapter introduces blockchain as a distributed ledger technology and a tool that governments can use to fundamentally redefine management of data, processes, and coordination across agencies while maintaining transparency. The chapter further dives into cases where blockchain has been used to manage public records, procurement, utilities, citizen participation, and resource management. It also discusses technical, legal, financial, and social limitations of the technology. The chapter concludes with an explanation of an implementation framework with a strong focus on long-term sustainability, inclusiveness, regulatory compatibility, and incremental adoption. The combination of these makes blockchain a strategic solution to reestablish accountability, transparency, and confidence in urban services instead of a panacea.
This dissertation explores the impacts of blockchain-based audit trails and stakeholder feedback loops on ethical conduct in U.S. federal and state public administration. The study addresses ongoing ethical problems in government, such as low levels of accountability, inadequate procedures, policy manipulation, and a waning public confidence in government, despite the existence of government ethics codes and oversight bodies. Ethical adherence is considered using two complementary theories: the virtue theory (Honesty, Fairness, Integrity, Responsiveness, Trust) and the deontological theory (Duty fulfillment, Rule following, Documentation, Accountability, Procedural compliance). The study was conducted with closed and open-ended answers from public administration participants who have experience in ethics, compliance, audit, procurement, oversight, stakeholder engagement, or other related areas using an anonymous online survey via Google Forms. Ten responses were received and nine valid responses were analyzed. The findings revealed that audit trails linked to blockchain were seen as the most beneficial for holding accountable, tracing, ensuring record integrity, reviewing and ensuring duty-based compliance. Stakeholder feedback loops were seen as most beneficial for fairness, honesty, telling the truth, responsiveness and public trust. The two tools were perceived as complementary tools and not as competing tools. The results, however, also showed that transparency instruments are not necessarily the drivers of ethical behavior. They rely on leadership, staff development, correct data entry, active data review, meaningful follow-up to feedback, and follow-through on actions. The study brings to the public administration literature a connection between mechanisms of transparency and ethical adherence in both virtue-based and duty-based approaches. It provides pragmatic advice to agencies that want to build ethical governance through technology, participation, and organizational culture in complex federal, state, and government-adjacent administrative contexts, in everyday practice.
Jaume Martin Bosch, Marco Combetto, Luca Tangi, A. Paula Rodriguez Müller
Introduction Blockchain technology (BCT) has been widely discussed as a potentially valuable technology for advancing sustainable development in the public sector. Its core features, including transparency, immutability and decentralisation, may contribute to more accountable, efficient and inclusive public services. However, limited empirical evidence exists on how BCT-based public sector initiatives align with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Methods This study examines 306 public sector BCT-based use cases across the EU, compiled by the Public Sector Tech Watch observatory. We apply a GPT-4o-based AI text classification pipeline to assess the degree of alignment between project descriptions and the 17 SDGs. The pipeline combines refined SDG descriptors, structured prompting and documented model parameters. Its outputs are benchmarked against a human-coded subset to assess validity. Results The results show strong alignment with SDG 9 (Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure) and SDG 17 (Partnerships for the Goals), followed by more moderate alignment with SDG 8 (Decent Work and Economic Growth). By contrast, goals such as SDG 2, SDG 6 and SDG 14 remain weakly represented. These findings provide an empirical overview of how BCT applications in EU public administrations are framed in relation to the SDGs. Discussion By highlighting patterns of alignment between BCT adoption and the SDGs, this study offers evidence to inform policymakers, practitioners and future research on sustainability-oriented public sector innovation. It also demonstrates the value of AI-assisted classification for mapping large corpora of digital government initiatives, while recognising that the results capture stated or perceived alignment rather than verified sustainability impacts.
Emerging economies collect substantially less tax revenue relative to national income than advanced economies, and a large share of this shortfall reflects weak enforcement capacity rather than statutory rates. Digital audio technologies and integrated financial information systems are increasingly promoted as instruments for narrowing this gap, yet the evidence on whether, when, and how they raise compliance and transparency remains scattered across public economics, accounting, and information systems scholarship. This review synthesises empirical and conceptual work published between 2006 and 2026 to assess what is known about four interlocking mechanisms: third party information reporting and electronic invoicing, electronic filing and payment platforms, continuous auditing and analytics, and distributed ledger and regulatory technology approaches to data governance. Three consistent patterns emerge. First, technologies that create verifiable third-party information trails produce the most durable compliance gains, with value added tax self-enforcement, electronic sales registers, and consumer incentive schemes generating measurable revenue increases, while technologies that merely digitise existing processes without new information yield smaller and more fragile effects. Second, the revenue and transparency return to digital systems are conditional on administrative capacity, data quality, and political commitment rather than automatic, which explains why similar tools succeed in some jurisdictions and fail in others. Third, the accounting profession is moving from periodic sampling toward continuous assurance and population level analytics, but adoption in emerging economies lags because of skills, infrastructure, and governance constraints. These findings suggest that the design and sequencing of digital reforms matter more than the sophistication of the technology itself. The review offers tax administrators and policymakers evidence graded account of which interventions rest on strong causal evidence and which rest on weaker conceptual or cross sectional foundations, and it identifies the conditions under which digital instruments translate into sustained fiscal gains rather than symbolic modernization.
Omar Al-Jamili, Abdulaziz Fahmi Omar Faqera, Mohd Adan Omar, Shehu M. Sarkintudu · 8 authors
Open Government Data (OGD) has become central to digital transformation and data-driven governance, yet scholarly understanding of how OGD initiatives progress from initial adoption to sustained institutionalization remains fragmented. This study aims to synthesize the existing literature and develop an integrative framework that explains the socio-technical mechanisms underpinning the long-term sustainability and value creation of OGD initiatives. The study integrates bibliometric analysis with a systematic literature review of 481 peer-reviewed articles published between 2010 and 31 December 2024. Quantitative science-mapping techniques are combined with qualitative thematic synthesis to capture the intellectual structure, technological evolution, and theoretical foundations of OGD research. The findings reveal rapid growth and thematic diversification in OGD scholarship, with increasing attention to advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence and blockchain. However, the literature remains theoretically fragmented across behavioral, institutional, and public-value perspectives. Two critical gaps are identified: insufficient theorization of institutional legitimacy as a driver of continuity, and limited exploration of user-centric governance mechanisms shaping sustained data reuse. To address these gaps, the study proposes the Socio-Technical Institutionalization Model (STIM), which conceptualizes OGD sustainability as the dynamic alignment of technological infrastructures, institutional arrangements, and user ecosystems. By combining quantitative science mapping with systematic thematic synthesis and proposing the STIM lifecycle framework, this study offers an integrative synthesis that extends prior OGD reviews. The framework bridges fragmented theoretical perspectives and explains how open data initiatives may evolve from adoption to institutionalized value creation within complex digital governance ecosystems.
Current anti-corruption measurement tools are unable to accurately assess local corruption realities because they are disconnected from, and driven by, experts who are far removed from the contexts in which they must be used. In this chapter, we argue that, due to the variable definition of corruption, those best positioned to monitor it are the citizens impacted by it. We examine how and why citizens can be incentivised to participate in monitoring efforts, while also looking ahead to novel methods, such as blockchain and crowdsourcing, to create pathways for reporting, participation, and accountability. We highlight that, with robust protections for citizens and capacity building, citizen-led anti-corruption measurement can be a sustainable method for building transparency and trust.
Novan Ilham Ramadhan, Rizky Parlika, Ardhon Rakhmadi
Electronic voting (e-voting) systems continue to face challenges related to transparency, result validation, and duplicate voting prevention. Blockchain technology offers characteristics such as decentralization, transparency, and immutability that can support more auditable voting processes. This study presents a prototype implementation of a blockchain-based e-voting system using Ethereum smart contracts to support transparent vote recording, public auditability, and wallet-level double voting prevention. The system was implemented using Solidity-based smart contracts deployed on the Ethereum Sepolia Testnet and integrated with MetaMask for transaction authentication. Smart contracts manage election creation, candidate registration, voter registration, vote recording, duplicate vote prevention, and voting result finalization. An audit trail mechanism was implemented to allow voting activities and transaction records to be publicly verified through the Etherscan blockchain explorer. All predefined functional testing scenarios were executed successfully. The evaluation results indicate an average gas usage of 75,109 gas, an estimated transaction cost of 0.000113 ETH, and a transaction latency of approximately 4–5 seconds. The implemented wallet validation mechanism and hasVoted mapping effectively prevent duplicate voting attempts associated with the same wallet address. However, the proposed system represents a prototype-level evaluation conducted on the Ethereum Sepolia Testnet and does not provide voter identity verification, ballot anonymity, or real-world election readiness. The findings demonstrate the feasibility of Ethereum smart contracts for transparent auditability and wallet-level double voting prevention in blockchain-based voting environments.