The missing piece: the link between blockchain and public policy design

Abstract Through a bibliometric analysis, this article researches the central topics that link blockchain to public policy design and investigates the key policy priorities for the use of blockchain technology in the public sector. The analysis points out six thematic foci in the current literature: (1) business and strategic management, (2) technology adoption, (3) system infrastructure, (4) cryptocurrency and decentralized economy, (5) regulations and geopolitics, and (6) governance. The analysis demonstrates a high degree of co-occurrence between “barriers” and “blockchain adoption” confirming that blockchain adoption in the public sector domain is perceived as challenging. The association of the term “barrier” with other key terms suggests theoretical, technological, resource-based, and managerial challenges as the main showstoppers. The bibliometric analysis also reveals the underrepresentation of social and political sciences in our knowledge base, despite the thematic relevance of these disciplines to understand the underlying challenges. More research from these disciplines is warranted to understand better how this technology can be best integrated into the public policy processes.


Introduction
Since the advent of Bitcoin in 2008, blockchain and blockchain-backed innovations such as cryptocurrencies, decentralized finance (DeFi), smart contracts, non-fungible tokens (NFTs), self-sovereign identity (SSI) systems, and most recently metaverse have stirred much interest and enthusiasm across industries and markets.Governments were not exempt from this hype and many blockchain projects were initiated to improve the value of public services.Categorically, three areas of applications have become prominent for blockchain projects in the public sector (Tan 2022).First, using blockchain for identity verification and in supporting self-sovereign digital identity systems for individuals and businesses.Second, using blockchain for asset registries.Registry of land titles, patents, health data, and diplomas are some of the findings in policy design processes and calls for more studies by political and social scientists to research the implications of this new technology in public policy and public governance processes.

Policy problem
Blockchain covers several underlying technologies (e.g.smart contracts, token technology, and decentralized applications) that can jointly support a decentralized and automated information infrastructure.The key value proposition of blockchain is to provide a secure and immutable decentralized system of transactions, without a need for a centralized authority to check the validity of transactions.In the context of public governance, blockchain has the potential of shaping the exchanges between public institutions, citizens, and social and economic agents.At the most basic level, blockchain can be used as an information infrastructure for more efficient management of public information between governance actors.At a more advanced level, blockchain can leverage the features of decentralized information management in support of big data and advanced analytic techniques, and through smart contracts can create autonomous organizations that can replace human agency and traditional forms of public sector organizations in public governance (Tan 2022).
Despite this potential of blockchain for public governance, empirical research suggests that the uptake of blockchain projects in the public sector remains limited (Luthra et al. 2023;Feng et al. 2020;Lindman et al. 2020).A 2020 OECD report suggests that many projects in the public sector remain at the piloting level, failing to move into the production phase (Lindman et al. 2020).As the report puts it "blockchain projects have had minimal impact on the public sector so far".
Why do we see this limited uptake of blockchain projects in the public sector?Systematic literature reviews highlight a variety of reasons that can explain the challenges of public sector organizations in bringing their blockchain projects into the production stage.These reasons vary across technical, business, value-based, organizational, and regulative issues.Below, I provide a short overview of the most articulated challenges in the literature constraining the proliferation of blockchain use cases.

Scalability
Scalability problems with blockchain use cases are often mentioned as a key challenge for blockchain use cases (Khan et al. 2021;Biswas and Gupta 2019;Koteska et al. 2017).Slow processing rate (i.e.throughput) of transactions, limitations to 1 MB per block size, proof-of-work protocol, latency, duplicate storage of information, and repetition of identity verification at each node are some scalability issues identified in the literature.

Security
Despite their higher security potential through their distributed structure, blockchains are not immune to cyberattacks and data malleability.Fifty-one percent attacks, double-spending attacks, network-based attacks, selfish mining attacks, crypto-jacking are some forms of cyberattacks affecting the security of blockchains (Li et al. 2017;Gervais et al. 2016).

Market and business risks
The business risks associated with blockchain applications, especially concerning the use of cryptocurrency, have been frequently mentioned in various studies.Price volatility and fluctuating exchange rates, lack of business cases, uncertain revenue models for miners, frequent usage of cryptocurrencies in underground economy, and concerns about the user-friendliness of blockchain applications are certain market and business risks (Hoelscher 2018;Beck et al. 2017).

Transparency and privacy
Blockchain's technical features allow pseudonymity to network users, but how to ensure transparency and trust across network without undermining the privacy of users is a technically challenging issue.Especially, the transparency of transactions threatens the data privacy of personal records (Casino et al. 2019).Some privacy issues can be addressed through technological solutions such as zero-knowledge proofs (Lyons et al. 2018).Yet, cross-examination of transactions and datasets by analyzing previous transaction logs can reveal the true identity of involved parties (Androulaki et al. 2013).While this feature can be useful to identify offenders of criminal acts in blockchain networks (Perlroth et al. 2021), it may undermine the use of blockchain for transactions involving sensitive public data.

Organizational issues
Organizational challenges include a lack of understanding and expertise inside the organizations to adopt and oversee blockchain implementation, limited resources to maintain the blockchain network, and organizational culture issues that might create resistance against the delegation of power and control to network users in blockchain governance (Upadhyay 2020;Pan et al. 2020).Other organizational issues can be more technical in nature such as ensuring the interoperability of blockchain solutions within existing information structures and with other initiatives on data transactions (Zhang et al. 2018).

Governance
Governing blockchain networks contains several tradeoffs and decisions at micro, meso, and macro levels (Tan et al. 2022).Some governance challenges concern the decisions about the blockchain infrastructure (e.g.permissioned/permissionless), consensus mechanism (PoW, PoS, etc.), incentive mechanisms, and decision-making mechanisms (e.g.on-chain vs. off-chain decisions).Other governance risks articulated in the literature concern with the technological imperatives of blockchains such as the irreversibility of transactions, difficulties in software protocol updates, and recovery of lost distributed ledger technology keys.

Legal and regulatory issues
Legal and regulatory issues concerning blockchain focus on the absence of standards and legislative conditions that bind each country to the use of blockchain applications and technologies.The absence or delay of regulatory conditions concerning taxation and guarantees surrounding cryptocurrencies, NFTs, and digital currencies are seen as obstacles in the widescale adoption of blockchain use cases (Goldenfein and Leiter 2018;Yeoh 2017).
Evidently, the challenges surrounding the use of blockchain technology in the public sector domain are diverse and complex.A few studies in the literature (e.g.Luthra et al. 2023;Biswas and Gupta 2019) worked on creating hierarchies among these challenges to help policy design processes.These studies approach blockchain adoption as a multicriteria decision-making problem that is composed of complex dependencies and interactions among identified barriers (Biswas and Gupta 2019).For instance, focusing on the implementation of blockchain in industry and service sectors, Biswas and Gupta (2019) identified challenges in scalability and market-based risks as the most influencing barriers, while high sustainability costs and poor economic behavior are the most influenced barriers during successful blockchain adoption.
In another study focusing on the adoption challenges in the public sector, Luthra et al. ( 2023) explored the relationships across 13 identified challenges.Their research found that ensuring public values such as privacy, data protection, equal access, and realizing the desired system quality such as speed, scalability, flexibility, and security as first-tier challenges in realizing BCT applications in government.The same study suggests that addressing regulative and lack of standard challenges are the last tier challenges.
The insight gained from multi-criteria decision-making methodologies (e.g.Decision-Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL), interpretive structural modeling) can facilitate the policy design processes.Nonetheless, one weakness of these methodologies is the established hierarchical relationships among identified variables are based on the interpretations of the researchers on the assumed direction of relationships, and thus, heavily influenced by the scientific backgrounds of involved researchers.This inherent weakness may undermine the suggested methodologies' reliability in different application areas.One way of overcoming this weakness is to analyze the aggregate scholarly work on blockchain literature.
Through scientometrics methods, we can gain insight into what is perceived as challenging across the disciplines and reveal the central issues that link blockchain to the context of government.By analyzing the whole literature, we may develop a holistic understanding of our (missing) links between blockchain technology and public policy design, and further our understanding of how to address them.

Methodology and discussion
Scientometrics is defined as the "all quantitative aspects of science and scientific research" (Sengupta 1992).Scientometrics adopts texts (documents) as empirical units of analysis, and focuses on the impact of academic outputs (e.g.citation indexes such as h-index), the impact of disciplines, journals, authors, countries, and research networks on knowledge production, mapping the topology of relationships between elements or aspects of science (Rip 1988), and constructing indicators that can be used in policy and management contexts (Leydesdorff and Milojevi c 2015).Bibliometrics analysis refers to the application of scientometric methods to books and other forms of written communication produced as part of scientific disciplines (Pritchard 1969).
In this research, I conducted a bibliometric analysis to carry out a conceptual construction from the peer-reviewed academic production related to the use of blockchain in the public sector and examined the co-occurrence of the most relevant and frequent concepts, and the proximity between them (Ding et al. 2001;Zupic and Cater 2015).
The Web of Science (WoS) Core Collection was used to retrieve the bibliographic data.On November 9 2022, a topic search query was conducted including the keywords, titles, and abstracts.The search query was set as follows: (blockchain Ã OR "distributed ledger technology") AND (adopt Ã OR implement Ã ) AND (government Ã OR "public sector Ã ").For the search algorithm of WoS, the sequence in the query is important.The words in the parentheses are found first and then those results are combined with other terms of the statement.The search resulted in 513 results.Gl€ anzel and Moed (2013) suggest a value of 50 as a minimum for approximate properties such as "normality" of the distribution of means and relative frequencies in scientometrics.
The data are first analyzed based on the representation of the scientific disciplines.The dataset contains entries from a total of 78 academic disciplines.Figure 1 illustrates the weight of each discipline in the academic production of the topic search.The analysis shows that an overwhelming majority of scientific production comes from the academic outlets associated with natural sciences such as computer sciences, information sciences, and engineering, whereas the most represented social sciences are management (8.6%),economics (6.8%), business (6.4%),and law (2.9%).More strikingly, the academic disciplines such as public administration and political sciences that are specifically focusing on the study of government cumulatively represent less than 5% of the academic works.Academic works published in the categorical areas of "Public administration" and "Political sciences" respectively represent 2.5% and 0.98% of the dataset.In the second stage of the analysis, I conducted a text analysis based on the cooccurrence of the key concepts in the abstract.For the analysis, VOSviewer version 1.16.18 was used.This software is developed by the Center for Science and Technology Studies Leiden University and allows running various bibliometric analytics including the cluster analysis of co-occurrences taken from the dataset (Van Eck and Waltman 2017).
In the software, the occurrences attribute indicates the number of documents in which a keyword occurs.When working with terms, the definition of the occurrences attribute depends on the counting method that is chosen.In binary counting, the attribute indicates the number of documents in which a term occurs at least once.In full counting, the attribute indicates the total number of occurrences of a term in all documents.The analysis was conducted on the text of abstracts and with full counting.For the selection of the items, 10 occurrences have been selected as the threshold number.Of the 11,921 terms, 389 items met the threshold.For each of these items, a relevance score is calculated to select the most relevant term.Sixty percent of the most relevant terms (a total of 233) are selected for mapping the densities and clusters among the items.
The network analysis of the most relevant items resulted in six clusters.For the data visualization, two network maps are produced.Figure 2 visualizes the mapping of networks between items under each cluster.The size of the label and the circle of an item is determined by the weight of the item.The higher the weight of an item, the larger the label and the circle of the item (Van Eck and Waltman 2017).To better interpret the conceptual construction of cluster formations, a cluster density map is produced, where the density of items is displayed separately for each cluster of items.Figure 3 shows the cluster density mapping.The weight given to the color of a certain cluster is determined by the number of items belonging to that cluster in the neighborhood of the point (Van Eck and Waltman 2017).
By taking into account the scope of items and their weight in defining the density of clusters, I labeled the clusters under six thematic areas that associate with the use of blockchain technologies in the public sector.In the order of magnitude of each cluster (i.e. the number of containing items), the thematic areas are: (1) business and strategic management, (2) technology adoption, (3) system infrastructure, (4) cryptocurrency and decentralized economy, (5) regulations and geopolitics, and (6) governance.
Below, I elaborate on each cluster and highlight the key emerging themes and associated policy issues in relation to the thematic area.In the subsequent section, I will talk about the implications of these findings on the policy design processes concerning the use of blockchain in the public sector and discuss what insight can be gained for researchers and practitioners.

Business and strategic management (red cluster)
The first cluster contains 56 items that are mostly associated with the processes of business management (e.g.supply chain, demand, enterprise, manufacturer, retailer, consumer, firm, etc.) and strategic management (e.g.strategy, education, digital transformation, digitalization, innovation, enabler, subsidy, business model, etc.).The combination of these items suggests that this cluster captures the bibliometric data mostly from studies focusing on the use of blockchain technology in business use cases.
A closer analysis of the cluster points out the emergence of two interesting patterns.The first pattern is, terms such as "covid", "pandemic", and "outbreak" come out as frequently mentioned concepts within the bibliographic data captured by the cluster, suggesting that blockchain adoption in business use cases is contextually associated with Covid-19 pandemics.This contextual association could be through the overall acceleration of digitalization processes during the pandemic (Amankwah-Amoah et al. 2021) and/or by the weight of scholarly work published during the Covid-19 pandemic within the cumulative academic corpus captured by the dataset.Hence, the relevance of pandemic-related terms could be inconsequential rather than pointing out an underlying relationship between the pandemic and blockchain-related business use cases.
The second pattern is observable in the linkages of "barriers" (see Figure 4).First, within the red cluster, the term appears to be closely related to terms such as "supply chain", "food supply chain", "supply chain management", suggesting that articles focusing on supply chain management use cases frequently associate the use of blockchain technology with barriers.Second, the high degree of co-occurrence between "barriers", and "blockchain adoption" and "adoption" confirm that blockchain adoption in the public sector domain is perceived as challenging.Moreover, the associations with other sets of terms point out certain dimensions necessary to understand the challenges associated with the use of blockchain in the public sector.Specifically, the network analysis points out theoretical challenges (through the links with "factor" and "implication"), technological challenges (through the links with "IoT" (internet of things) and "bct" (blockchain technology)), resource challenges (through the links with "knowledge", "expert", "time", and "economy"), and managerial challenges (through the links with "strategy" and "support") as categorical barriers in blockchain implementation.

Technology adoption (green cluster)
To categorize this cluster, I use the term technology adoption challenges.This cluster appears to capture the terms "adoption", "blockchain adoption", "factors", "knowledge", "drivers", "awareness", "ease", "trends", "originality", "theory", "intention", and "effects".These terms are closely related to the literature on technology adoption and the terminology of technology adoption models.
Throughout the years, many adoption models (e.g.technology adoption model, theory of planned behavior, theory of reasoned action, and unified theory of acceptance and use of technology, etc.) have been developed in information sciences to explain factors and drivers influencing user behavior in accepting or resisting technology (Venkatesh and Davis 2000;Venkatesh et al. 2003;Ajzen 1991;Davis 1989;Fishbein and Ajzen 1975).A common characteristic of these models is that they aim to explain how users behave in adopting a particular piece of technology and what factors affect the processes of technology adoption at the individual level.The bibliometric data captured by this cluster appears to be related to the theoretical explanations of why users adopt or do not blockchain technology in the public sector domain.

System infrastructure (blue cluster)
This cluster contains concepts such as "architecture", "privacy", "user", "protocol", "identity", "record", "storage", "chain", etc., that conceptually capture the choices of system infrastructure.A visual analysis of the cluster unveils several subthemes that seemingly attract the attention of researchers in the corresponding body of work.
One subtheme appears to be related to the use of blockchain technology in identity management observed through the weight and co-occurrence of terms such as "identity", "self-sovereign-identity(ssi)", "ssi", and "digital identity".
Another subtheme emerges around the concepts of "personal data", "patient", "hospital", and "data integrity" suggesting the use of blockchain technology for the management of health data.
A third broader subtheme seems to appear around the technical features of blockchain architecture observable through the weight of terms such as "scalability", "privacy", "storage", "chain", cloud", "device", "architecture", "network", "time", "property", and "record".A last discernible topic could be about the security of blockchain through the terms of "vulnerability", "attack", and "protocol".
The thematic focus of this cluster clearly emphasizes the impact of blockchain and cryptocurrencies on the financial and economic aspects.A closer look also suggests that terms such as "anonymity", "principle", "algorithm", "person", and "community" are frequently co-occurring issues as part of the cryptocurrency debate.Consequently, one underlying topic within this body of work appears to be the influence of blockchain algorithms and principles at personal and community levels.

Regulations and geopolitics (purple cluster)
This cluster contains terms that are centered around the key term "regulation".The thematic relationship of "regulation" with other closely positioned concepts such as "law", "compliance", "model law", "rule", and "standards" suggests that this cluster contains academic works focusing on the regulative aspects of blockchain implementation in the public sector.
A closer look at the relationships reveals two thematic patterns under regulative discussions.One pattern is appearing through the concepts such as "banking", "financial institution", and "asset" suggesting the financial focus of regulative studies.
Another pattern seems to be about geopolitical implications of regulations through the appearance of terms such as "european union", "china", "usa", "energy", and "digital economy".

Governance challenges (cyan cluster)
The last cluster of the network mapping contains the least number of terms but contains big circles meaning they are highly occurring concepts within the dataset and very centrally associated within the networking map.This suggests that this cluster contains the themes that crosscut the sectoral and disciplinary foci studying the use of blockchain in the public sector domain.
The salient concepts in this cluster are "governance", "project", "society", "world", "case study", "decentralization", "peer", "third" party", "transition", and "transformation".The thematic association of these terms suggests that this cluster captures conceptually the governance and macro-level questions surrounding the implementation of blockchain in the public sector.

New directions and recommendations for improvements
The bibliometric analysis provides some insights for practitioners and researchers alike.As a starting point, the dispersion of academic production across the disciplines shows a clear research gap in the social and political sciences concerning the topic.Less than 5% of the academic production about the use of blockchain in the public sector comes from the disciplines that specifically study government and the public sector.This is a salient finding as the search terms included the keywords of "government" and "public sector", which are traditionally associated with public administration, political sciences, and social sciences.
The underrepresentation of these academic disciplines in the dataset calls for attention to the interpretation of findings in the policy design context.Thematic associations and clusters concerning the adoption of blockchain technology in public administration are heavily skewed toward the epistemologies and theoretical bases stemming outside of political and social sciences.By the same token, the frequency of concepts that are associated with public values, administrative capacities, and organizational processes remains limited in the network analysis.In contrast, these elements are mentioned as important drivers in case studies focusing on the implementation of blockchain systems in the public sector (Luthra et al. 2023).
Keeping these limitations in mind, the bibliometric analysis shows that the adoption of blockchain technology in the public sector is an interdisciplinary and multifaceted problem.Six categorical areas emerge at the foci of the current literature.The first body of literature is about the business and strategic management processes concerning the use of blockchain.This category contains the highest number of terms in the dataset.Hence, the business value of use cases and strategic management decisions concerning blockchain use cases appear as core concerns for policy design processes.This category also contains the key term "barrier".Its thematic links suggest that technological, resource-related, and managerial factors come out as challenges in the subject area of inquiry.
The second categorical area focuses on blockchain adoption.The keyword analysis of this cluster points out the impact of technology adoption literature.Technology adoption theories and models stem from the information sciences, and they concern with explaining user behaviors in technology adoption.The insight provided by this literature can help policy designers to understand better the conditions behind user preferences and behaviors in adopting blockchain-based solutions in a public service domain.
The third categorical area is about system infrastructure, and this body of work seems to be capturing the technical questions concerning the design of blockchain solutions.Especially, technical configurations of blockchain architecture, security, and transparency issues are the key terms emerging in this cluster.A practical interpretation of this finding is that technical experts and IT departments need to be part of the policy design processes concerning the adoption of blockchain technology in the public sector.
The fourth categorical area focuses on the cryptocurrency and financial implications of blockchain technology.Cryptocurrency and blockchain have thematically co-existed from the moment of the Bitcoin whitepaper (Nakamoto 2008).In time, blockchain has found multiple different areas of application (Casino et al. 2019).Nonetheless, the implications of this technology in financial processes remain a core interest in the current knowledge base.A sub-category in this literature appears to be focusing on the techno-social dimensions highlighting the terms associated with principles and communities.
The fifth categorical area is focusing on the regulations and geopolitical considerations influencing the adoption of blockchain in the public sector.This category reassures that macro-level institutional factors are influential in the policy design processes concerning the use of blockchain technology.Hence, having legal and policy expertise in policy design processes appears to be substantial for the wider adoption of blockchain solutions in government.
The last category, governance, contains the least number of terms but its centrality in the network analysis positions it as a crosscutting theme concerning the adoption of blockchain technology in the public sector.Indeed, some recent studies draw attention to understanding better the implications of blockchain technology in public governance, and how blockchain governance can affect the public sector processes (Tan et al. 2022;Werbach 2020;Ølnes et al. 2017).The centrality of governance in the network map demonstrates that assessing the governance dimensions needs to be at the heart of policy design processes.

Conclusions
Despite the growing literature on blockchain applications and the adoption challenges, we lack a comprehensive view of the policy challenges associated with the use of blockchain technology in the public sector.This article sheds light on the key issues arising from academic research that can set a research agenda for political scientists and guide policy practitioners to implement this technology in the public policy processes.
The findings from the bibliometric analysis are complementary to the challenges identified in the policy problem section.However, one overlooked challenge coming out from the research is various policy decisions to be made by decision-makers that seemingly crosscut decisions at technical (e.g.system infrastructure), organizational (e.g.technology adoption), sectoral (e.g.cryptocurrency), managerial (e.g. business and strategic management), and political and macro-governance levels (e.g.regulations and geopolitics, governance).Understanding the interlinks and interrelationships across these dimensions and how best to address the underlying challenges is a policy design question.
Some key lessons for policy designers are as follows.First, the challenges and issues are multifaceted that go beyond the technical expertise.Addressing these challenges and issues requires a policy approach and expertise that links technological, managerial, legal, business, and political expertise.A collaboration between managers, policymakers, IT, business, and legal experts is needed to introduce blockchain technology in public service processes.
Second, all these cross-disciplinary issues appear to be interlinked through governance considerations.In the public sector context, blockchain governance design calls for considerations at technical, techno-social, and social levels and prioritizes design processes over implementation decisions (Tan et al. 2022).
Lastly, the bibliometric analysis demonstrates the underrepresentation of social and political sciences in our knowledge base.Despite the small weight of social/political sciences in the dataset, themes central to political and social sciences frequently appear in the papers on the topic.The findings of this research clearly show that we need more research from these disciplines focusing on the implication of this technology for government and public service processes.

Table 1 .
Overview of the dataset.