Negotiating Decentralised Governance In Inter-Organisational Negotiating Decentralised Governance In Inter-Organisational Collaborations Collaborations

Governing the Digital Commons: A Blockchain-based Governing the Digital Commons: A Blockchain-based Decentralised Autonomous Organisations Framework for Decentralised Autonomous Organisations Framework for Ecosystem Coordination Ecosystem Coordination

Programmable governance and institutional design in decentralized autonomous organizations: a comparative study of RARI DAO, Arbitrum DAO, and Optimism DAO

Decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) represent one of the most consequential experiments in organizational design to emerge from blockchain technology. By encoding governance rules into smart contracts and recording every vote, proposal, and treasury decision immutably on-chain, DAOs offer globally distributed communities a high degree of transparency and accountability in collective decision-making. This study examines governance design and participatory innovation across three DAOs: RARI DAO, Arbitrum DAO, and Optimism DAO. Each has taken a distinct structural approach to the problem of collective decision-making at scale. Using a qualitative comparative case study method, the research draws on governance forum discussions, proposal records, and official documentation, analyzed through thematic coding and cross-case comparison. The theoretical frame draws primarily from Ostrom’s (1990) commons governance principles, with Scott’s (1995, 2014) institutional theory and Donaldson’s (2001) contingency theory applied as supplementary analytical lenses. Across all three cases, the findings indicate the emergence of increasingly formalized governance architectures designed to balance decentralization, coordination efficiency, and operational security. Communities building governance infrastructure from scratch, iterating rapidly in response to community feedback, and developing structural solutions: delegate incentive programs, participation incentive mechanisms, bicameral legitimacy systems, constitutional frameworks, and dedicated legal entities that represent an emerging configuration of governance mechanisms. Two cross-case findings are particularly notable. First, all three DAOs independently converged on a three-body governance architecture comprising a legal foundation, a security council, and token-holder governance — suggesting that similar governance problems, encountered in similar technical and legal environments, tend to produce similar structural solutions. Second, while these architectures are structurally similar, they differ significantly in how governance processes are implemented in practice, reflecting differences in scale, formalization, and community context. These findings contribute to the literature by providing a structured cross-case analysis of DAO governance design and offering practical insights into programmable institutional design and blockchain-enabled coordination systems.

Corporate governance and organisational performance in state-owned transport enterprises: An integrated model development perspective

This study explores the relationship between corporate governance and organisational performance within state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in the Zimbabwean transport sector, with the objective of developing an integrated and contextually relevant governance-performance model. Despite their critical role in facilitating mobility and supporting trade, SOEs such as Air Zimbabwe and Zimbabwe United Passenger Company (ZUPCO) continue to experience persistent challenges, including financial deficits, operational inefficiencies, and declining service delivery standards. Existing scholarship tends to examine corporate governance in isolation, often overlooking the broader organisational and institutional contexts within which these enterprises operate. Adopting a mixed-methods research design, this study integrates quantitative analyses, comprising descriptive statistics, correlation, regression, and moderation techniques, with qualitative insights derived from interviews. The research is underpinned by a multi-theoretical framework that incorporates the resource-based view (RBV), institutional theory, systems theory, and contingency theory. The findings reveal that corporate governance plays a pivotal role in influencing organisational performance, alongside key internal factors such as human capital, technological capability, organisational culture, leadership, and the external operating environment. These elements collectively affirm the multidimensional nature of organisational performance. However, the study also finds that political interference significantly undermines the positive impact of governance structures and organisational capabilities. The study makes a theoretical contribution by advancing an integrated governance-performance model, while empirically highlighting the moderating effect of political interference. From a practical standpoint, the findings underscore the importance of comprehensive reforms in SOEs that prioritise strengthened governance frameworks, reduced political intrusion, and enhanced organisational capacity.

Collaborative Governance and Network Management in Public Administration: Designing and Sustaining Effective Multi-Stakeholder Partnerships for Complex Public Problems

Collaborative governance has become central to addressing complex public problems such as climate change, urban poverty, public health crises, and social exclusion. These “wicked” challenges require coordination across organizational, sectoral, and jurisdictional boundaries, bringing together actors from government, private, and civic spheres. Defined as the processes and structures that enable such cross-boundary engagement to achieve public purposes unattainable by single entities, collaborative governance is now a key paradigm in public administration. Despite extensive scholarship, important gaps remain. These include understanding when collaboration outperforms traditional hierarchical governance, identifying the management capabilities needed to sustain cross-boundary cooperation, and addressing accountability and legitimacy concerns in multi-stakeholder arrangements. This study addresses these gaps through a systematic review of 124 peer-reviewed studies (2000–2025) and comparative analysis of nineteen initiatives across thirteen countries. Drawing on network governance theory, transaction cost theory, and collaborative advantage theory, it proposes the Collaborative Governance Performance Framework (CGPF). This model identifies three core determinants of performance: network design principles, collaborative management capabilities, and institutional enabling conditions. Key findings show that trust is not a starting condition but develops through effective collaboration. Network orchestration emerges as the most critical yet scarce management capability. Accountability deficits represent the most significant governance risk, while unmanaged power asymmetries can distort outcomes. The study concludes by outlining a structured agenda for strengthening collaborative governance capacity, emphasizing the need for improved design, management, and institutional support to enhance effectiveness and legitimacy in addressing complex public challenges.

Institutionalising corporate governance: contradictions, negotiated compromises and unintended consequences

This study examines how corporate governance (CG) reforms emerge, institutionalise and are enacted across institutional levels. Focussing on three reform cycles in Pakistan (2002, 2012 and 2017), it explains how governance codes are negotiated, hybridised and resisted under family ownership and political patronage, and why formally stronger regulations may nonetheless produce symbolic compliance, selective implementation and strategic exit. Drawing on Dillard et al.’s (2004) multi-level framework, integrating neo-institutional sociology, structuration theory and Weber’s axes of tension, the study analyses 41 interviews with regulators, market actors and executives, complemented by documentary analysis spanning 1995–2020. Data were coded thematically and interpreted longitudinally across socio-political, organisational-field and organisational levels. CG reform is neither linear nor convergent. International financial agencies exerted coercive and normative pressures, but these interacted with entrenched family capitalism to produce negotiated outcomes and partial institutionalisation across all three cycles. Boards, committees and disclosure practices were formally adopted yet routinely decoupled from decision-making. Symbolic compliance, selective adoption and strategic delisting emerged as rational responses to preserve family control; the 2017 Regulations strengthened legal formality without altering underlying power dynamics. The study focuses on listed family-controlled firms, with interview data centred on 2012 and the early post-2017 period. Future research should track enforcement, investor activism and digital reporting across countries and time. Effective CG requires independent regulators, credible enforcement and positive incentives for controlling owners. Without concurrent reforms addressing political power and financing structures, formal regimes risk reinforcing symbolic compliance and selective exit. The paper links reform development to unintended organisational consequences across successive regulatory cycles, revealing tensions between formal rationality in CG codes and substantive rationality embedded in family capitalism. The multi-level framework offers a transferable lens for analysing CG reforms in other emerging economies characterised by concentrated ownership and entrenched power relations.

Blockchain Informational Attributes, Trust, and Inter-Organizational Collaboration in Construction Projects

Inter-organizational construction projects depend on intensive information exchange, interface coordination, and joint action among multiple organizations. However, their temporary, fragmented, and multi-actor nature often creates information asymmetry, unclear responsibility attribution, and weak trust foundations, thereby increasing collaboration costs and reducing governance efficiency. Although blockchain technology is often considered capable of addressing these problems through tamper-resistant records, transparent sharing, and smart contract execution, existing studies remain largely focused on technical functions or application scenarios. Less attention has been paid to how blockchain influences trust formation and inter-organizational collaboration through informational governance mechanisms. To address this gap, this study adopts a conceptual theory-building research design and develops a governance-oriented framework explaining how blockchain-enabled informational attributes affect trust and collaboration in construction projects. The study conceptualizes the blockchain’s governance role as an informational governance mechanism rather than a mere technical deployment, focusing on four informational attributes embedded in project transaction records: security, fidelity/authenticity, transparency, and procedural consistency. It further distinguishes interpersonal trust from inter-organizational trust, arguing that blockchain informational attributes may shape both interaction-based trust among boundary spanners and organization-level collaboration expectations. Interpersonal trust may also inform broader trust judgments toward partner organizations. At the collaboration level, the study conceptualizes inter-organizational collaboration as a process structure consisting of coordination and cooperation, with coordination creating conditions for deeper cooperation. The resulting framework links blockchain informational attributes, dual-level trust, coordination, and cooperation, and develops hypotheses for future empirical testing. This study contributes by shifting construction blockchain research from technology adoption and functional description toward informational governance explanation, extending dual-level trust logic into blockchain-enabled construction project governance, and applying the coordination–cooperation process logic to unpack how blockchain-enabled informational governance may influence inter-organizational collaboration.