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Blockchain for decentralised rural development and governance

Lookup NU author(s): Dr Ian Merrell

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Abstract

Rural areas are steadily being marginalised in a global economy where‘core/periphery’ models of development are dominant. To overcome this, rural areas haveexperimented with decentralised governance. However, this process is fraught with political,fiscal, and institutional difficulties. These often revolve around transparency andaccountability issues and low participation rates. Blockchain technology could act as a socialinnovation to overcome issues in decentralised governance, and rural areas could even proveto be a fertile environment for future innovation. In this conceptual paper, the potential ofblockchain technology is theoretically positioned into regional development discourses. Afterexploring how blockchain could be applied to rural governance and the barriers it needs toovercome to reach mass-adoption, a new distributed model of governance is suggested.

Publication metadata

Author(s): Merrell I

Publication type: Article

Publication status: Published

Journal: Blockchain: Research and Applications

Year: 2022

Volume: 3

Issue: 3

Print publication date: 01/09/2022

Online publication date: 29/04/2022

Acceptance date: 19/04/2022

Date deposited: 30/05/2022

ISSN (print): 2096-7209

ISSN (electronic): 2666-9536

Publisher: Elsevier

URL: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bcra.2022.100086

DOI: 10.1016/j.bcra.2022.100086

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