Polycentric Governance in Blockchain based applications: Transforming Government Services in the UAE

Blockchain, with its characteristic architecture, offers access to a real-time distributed trust-free system that can enhance the efficiency of undertaking transactions. Numerous use cases in governments, supply chains, healthcare, finance, retail, insurance, and various additional business sectors have thus sprung up based on both private (permissioned) and public (permissionless) blockchain technology. However, as with any technology, the governance system utilised is the main factor determining whether a given application of that technology will succeed or fail; without effective governance systems, users are more hesitant to adopt new technologies, thus leading to automatic failure. This thesis thus seeks to explore and discuss various governance models applicable to blockchain, as this area is still lack of academic and scholars research, with a focus on the polycentric governance model. The research identified a gap in the Blockchain governance, whereas several hacking have been occurred on Blockchain implementations, for example, between 2011 and 2016, several Bitcoin hacking events were reported, resulting in losses of around US$ 650 million. This is then utilised to establish a connection between various polycentric design principles and the characteristics of blockchain in order to develop a new conceptual governance framework suitable for adoption to support new blockchain technology implementations. Finally, this new framework is examined in the context of the service applications used by the UAE government, based on data gathered from multiple interviews with the specialists, with the aim of gaining insight into their perspectives. Whereas the UAE government services have been chosen as a case study as UAE is classified as one of the countries that utilizes and adopts the advance technology in different government implementations. The thesis overall thus adopts a qualitative research methodology based on in-depth interviews with participants recruited using a purposeful strategy, while template data analysis was used to analyse the data obtained from respondents more thoroughly.