Guest editorial: Bridging the chasm between “what could be” and “what is”: the impact of blockchain technologies on public service management

• Date: 02 January 2025
• Pages: 1-11
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1108/IJPSM-01-2025-384
• Published date: 02 January 2025
• Subject Matter: Public policy & environmental management,Politics,Public adminstration & management
• Author: Evrim Tan,Sorin Dan,Khuram Shahzad

Guest editorial: Bridging the chasm

between “what could be” and

“what is”: the impact of blockchain

technologies on public

service management

Introduction and aim of the special issue

While artificial intelligence (AI) has attracted significant attention from public management

scholars and practitioners in recent years, another emerging technology, blockchain, deserves

similar consideration due to its equally disruptive and transformative potential (Cagigas et al.,

2021;Sousa, 2023). In the late 2010s, blockchain technologies (BCT) created considerable

hype in policy circles, leading to growing experimentation and small-scale implementations

and a surge of scholarly interest across disciplines, including public administration and

management (Clifton et al., 2023;Tan, 2023). A growing body of research have explored the

application of this technology in various public sector domains, such as healthcare, education,

voting systems and governance more broadly (Tan et al., 2022;Cagigas et al., 2021;Khan

et al., 2021;Rodr�

ıguez Bol�

ıvar and Scholl, 2019;Casino et al., 2019).

In this initial phase (Phase 1), public management scholarship has primarily focused on

understanding and theorizing the implications of this disruptive technology in reshaping

existing processes within the public sector. However, much of this work remains largely

conceptual, discussing the potential impacts of blockchain without exploring its real-world

effects. While these early studies have been valuable in identifying frameworks and models for

the application of blockchain in government processes, our understanding of its actual impact

on the public sector remains limited.

One key challenge in assessing blockchain’sreal-world impact is that experimentation with

the technology has yet to reach to mature phase, what we might call Phase 2, characterized by

broader uptake and measurable impact on a larger scale (Lindman et al., 2022;Tan et al.,

2022). Some early findings suggest that government organizations across the world has

encountered setbacks in scaling up their blockchain projects to full-scale implementation

(Berryhill et al., 2018;Cagigas et al., 2021;Khan et al., 2021;Verma and Sheel, 2022). This

lack of wider-scale implementation of BCT in the public sector prevents the scholarly

community from fully exploring the potential implications of this technology for public

service management and governance. Furthermore, the exploratory and experimental nature of

blockchain implementation in government makes it challenging for researchers to collect

empirical data to explore the extent of actual implementation and understand the

transformative impact of blockchain in the public sector.

The goal of this special issue is to understand better this “chasm” between Phase 1 and

Phase 2 and to explore how we might bridge the gap between a conceptual “what could be?”

stage and a practical “what actually is” stage. Our approach in this special issue has been to call

for studies that integrate insights from public administration theory and practice, applying the

theoretical lenses from managerial and organizational sciences alongside empirical evidence

from real-world use cases. We argue that this is an important academic endeavour for public

administration scholarship, considering the implications of blockchain about how services are

organized and delivered in the digital age, both now and in the future.

With that aim in mind, this special issue presents seven articles that together contribute to

the emerging public administration literature on blockchain in three principal ways:

International

Journal of Public

Sector

Management

1

InternationalJournal of Public Sector

Management

Vol.38 No. 1, 2025

pp.1-11

©Emerald Publishing Limited

e-ISSN:1758-6666

p-ISSN:0951-3558

DOI10.1108/IJPSM-01-2025-384