Reducing Operational Redundancies and Enhancing Resource Efficiency in Airport Logistics Systems Through Blockchain Technology: Evidence from Nigeria

Abstract

Operational redundancies in Nigeria’s airport logistics, including duplicated clearance procedures, fragmented data systems, and repeated physical inspections, generate substantial inefficiencies that hamper service delivery, increase costs, and raise sustainability concerns. Despite growing interest in blockchain technology (BCT) as a logistics innovation, empirical evidence from Sub-Saharan African aviation contexts is largely limited. This study examines how stakeholders perceive BCT as a potential mechanism for reducing procedural, informational, and structural redundancies across Nigerian airport operations. A qualitative research design was employed, drawing on 45 semi-structured interviews with airport managers, airline officials, regulatory bodies, and aviation experts. Data were analyzed using Leximancer, yielding eight thematic clusters across 115 concepts. To augment thematic rigor, three quantitative measures—Normalized Pointwise Mutual Information (NPMI), Jaccard similarity, and degree centrality—were applied to the exported Concept Co-occurrence Matrix (CCMatrix; 6555 pairwise relationships). The blockchain theme exhibited the highest intra-theme cohesion (mean NPMI = 0.615) and the second highest normalized centrality (0.638), suggesting that it functions as a semantically tight, cross-cutting concept in participants’ discourse. The strongest concept pair, inefficiency–reliability (NPMI = 0.989; Jaccard = 0.909), is consistent with participants’ recurring association of service failures with procedurally generated redundancies. Stakeholders perceived BCT as potentially addressing these redundancies through shared ledger architectures, smart contract automation, and consolidated identity management, with anticipated sustainability co-benefits across energy, documentation and processing domains. The study offers an exploratory, contextualized application of the Technology–Organization–Environment (TOE) framework, the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT), and the Dynamic Capabilities Framework (DCF) to a resource-constrained developing-country aviation context and proposes a stakeholder-informed, phased BCT adoption framework—not yet tested through implementation—with direct policy and managerial implications for the Nigerian airport administration.