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The Realities of Blockchain-Based New Public Governance: An Explorative Analysis of Blockchain Implementations in Europe

Published: 11 July 2021 Publication History

Abstract

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.

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      cover image Digital Government: Research and Practice
      Digital Government: Research and Practice  Volume 2, Issue 3
      Regular Papers
      July 2021
      102 pages
      EISSN:2639-0175
      DOI:10.1145/3474845
      Issue’s Table of Contents
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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      Publication History

      Published: 11 July 2021
      Online AM: 07 May 2021
      Accepted: 01 April 2021
      Revised: 01 April 2021
      Received: 01 July 2020
      Published in DGOV Volume 2, Issue 3

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      Author Tags

      1. Empirical analysis
      2. blockchain governance
      3. blockchain projects
      4. expectation framework

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