More Web Proxy on the site http://driver.im/

research-article

Unraveling Transparency and Accountability in Blockchain

Authors:

F. Rizal Batubara,

Marijn JanssenAuthors Info & Claims

dg.o '19: Proceedings of the 20th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research

Pages 204 - 213

https://doi.org/10.1145/3325112.3325262

Published: 18 June 2019 Publication History

Abstract

Blockchain technology is heralded for improving trust and can provide a new approach for creating transparency and promoting accountability of government activities. However, it is still not clear how and in what ways blockchain technologies can improve this. This study examines the mechanisms and capability of blockchain technology to contribute to improved transparency and accountability in government. We use a set of system transparency and accountability concepts and mechanisms to critically assess the capabilities of blockchain. By means of a land registration case in Indonesia, we investigate the effects of blockchain on the transparency and accountability of the system. Creating transparency and accountability might be more difficult than expected, as non-technical issues need to be addressed. Based on our assessment we discuss key issues, including digital ID, privacy, interoperability, connectivity and technology aware population, computational efficiency and storage size, acceptability, check and control mechanism, data validity, digital signature, algorithm transparency, law and regulation support, and dispute resolution, that must be considered in developing a transparent and accountable blockchain-based e-Government system.

References

[1]

Bannister, F. and Connolly, R. 2011. The Trouble with Transparency: A Critical Review of Openness in e-Government. Policy & Internet. 3, 1 (Jan. 2011), 158–187.

[2]

Batubara, F.R. 2018. Challenges of Blockchain Technology Adoption for e-Government : A Systematic Literature Review. Proceedings of 19th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research (dg.o’18) (New York, 2018).

Digital Library

[3]

Baxter, G. and Sommerville, I. 2011. Socio-technical systems: From design methods to systems engineering. Interacting with Computers. 23, 1 (Jan. 2011), 4–17.

Digital Library

[4]

Behn, R.D. 2004. Rethinking Accountability in Education: How Should Who Hold Whom Accountable for What? Research in Public Policy Analysis and Management. 19–53.

[5]

Bertot, J.C. 2010. Using ICTs to create a culture of transparency: E-government and social media as openness and anti-corruption tools for societies. Government Information Quarterly. 27, 3 (Jul. 2010), 264–271.

[6]

BitFury 2016. On Blockchain Auditability.

[7]

Den Boer, M.G.W. 1998. Steamy Windows: Transparency and Openness in Justice and Home Affairs. Openness and Transparency In the European Union. I.T. V. Deckmyn, ed. European Institute of Public Administration. 91–105.

[8]

Buterin, V. 2014. Ethereum White Paper: A next-generation smart contract and decentralized application platform.

[9]

Casino, F. 2019. A systematic literature review of blockchain-based applications: Current status, classification and open issues. Telematics and Informatics. 36, (Mar. 2019), 55–81.

[10]

Condos, J. 2016. Blockchain Technology: Opprtunities ans Risks.

[11]

Cong, L.W. and He, Z. 2018. Blockchain Disruption and Smart Contracts.

[12]

Conradie, P. and Choenni, S. 2014. On the barriers for local government releasing open data. Government Information Quarterly. 31, (Jun. 2014), S10–S17.

[13]

Crosby, M. 2016. BlockChain Technology: Beyond Bitcoin. Applied Innovation Review Issue. 2 (2016).

[14]

Cucciniello, M. 2017. 25 Years of Transparency Research: Evidence and Future Directions. Public Administration Review. 77, 1 (Jan. 2017), 32–44.

[15]

Deborah Hardoon and Finn Heinrich 2013. Global Corruption Barometer 2013.

[16]

e-Government: 2015. http://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/ict/brief/e-government. Accessed: 2017-04-14.

[17]

EY 2016.14th Global Fraud Survey: Corporate misconduct - individual consequences Global enforcement focuses the spotlight on executive integrity.

[18]

Finck, M. 2017. Blockchains and Data Protection in the European Union. SSRN Electronic Journal. (Nov. 2017).

[19]

Fox, J. 2011. The Uncertain Relationship between Transparency and Accountability The uncertain transparency Jonathan Fox relationship between and accountability. Development in Practice. 17, 4/5 (Aug. 2011), 663–671.

[20]

Gaventa, J. and Mcgee, R. 2013. The impact of transparency and accountability initiatives. Development Policy Review. 31, S1 (Jul. 2013), s3–s28.

[21]

Government of Indonesia 1960. Basic Agrarian Law.

[22]

Government of Indonesia 1997. Land Registration.

[23]

Graglia, J.M. and Mellon, C. 2018. Blockchain and Property in 2018: At the End of the Beginning. Innovations: Technology, Governance, Globalization. 12, 1–2 (Jul. 2018), 90–116.

[24]

Grant, R. and Keohane, R.O. 2005. Accountability adn Absuses of Power in World Politics. American Political Science Review. 99, 1 (2005), 29–43.

[25]

Halachmi, A. and Greiling, D. 2013. Transparency, E-Government, and Accountability. Public Performance & Management Review. 36, 4 (Jun. 2013), 572–584.

[26]

Herlihy, M. and Moir, M. 2016. Enhancing Accountability and Trust in Distributed Ledgers. CoRR. abs/1606.0, (Jun. 2016).

[27]

Hileman, G. and Rauchs, M. 2017. 2017 Global Blockchain Benchmarking Study. SSRN Electronic Journal. (Sep. 2017).

[28]

Holzner, B. and Holzner, L. 2006. Transparency in global change : the vanguard of the open society. University of Pittsburgh Press.

[29]

iGov Survey 2016. Transforming Public Sector Service Delivery: Challenges and Opportunities 2016.

[30]

ITU 2017. ICT Facts and Figures 2017.

[31]

Katz, J. 2010. Digital Signatures. Springer US.

[32]

Kelm, K.M. 2017. Enhancing public sector performance : Malaysia's experience with transforming land administration.

[33]

Kim, P.S. 2005. Toward participatory and transparent governance: Report on the Sixth Global Forum on Reinventing Government. Public Administration Review. 65, 6 (Nov. 2005), 646–654.

[34]

Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung 2011. Concepts and Principles of Democratic Governance and Accountability. Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung.

[35]

Koppenjan, J. and Groenewegen, J. 2005. Institutional design for complex technological systems. 5, 3 (2005).

[36]

Kosack, S. and Fung, A. 2014. Does Transparency Improve Governance? Annual Review of Political Science. 17, 1 (May 2014), 65–87.

[37]

von Leon, D. 2019. A Lightweight Container Middleware for Edge Cloud Architectures. Fog and edge computing : principles and paradigms. R. Buyya and S.N. Srirama, eds. John Wiley & Son, Inc. 145–167.

[38]

Mabillard, V. and Zumofen, R. 2017. The complex relationship between transparency and accountability: A synthesis and contribution to existing frameworks. Public Policy and Administration. 32, 2 (Apr. 2017), 110–129.

[39]

Makala, B. and Anand, A. 2018. Blockchain and Land Administration. The Legal Aspects of Blockchain. A. Audia, eds. UNOPS.

[40]

Mans, R.S. 2015. Data Quality Issues. Springer, Cham. 79–88.

[41]

Maupin, J.A. 2017. Blockchains and the G20: Building an Inclusive, Transparent and Accountable Digital Economy. SSRN Electronic Journal. (Mar. 2017).

[42]

Meijer, D. and Ubacht, J. 2018. The governance of blockchain systems from an institutional perspective, a matter of trust or control? Proceedings of the 19th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research Governance in the Data Age - dgo ’18 (New York, New York, USA, 2018), 1–9.

Digital Library

[43]

Moura, T. and Gomes, A. 2017. Blockchain Voting and its effects on Election Transparency and Voter Confidence. Proceedings of the 18th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research - dg.o ’17 (New York, New York, USA, 2017), 574–575.

Digital Library

[44]

Nakamoto, S. 2008. Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System. www.bitcoin.org.

[45]

Nomura Research Institut 2016. Survey on Blockchain Technologies and Related Services FY2015 Report.

[46]

Ølnes, S. 2017. Blockchain in government: Benefits and implications of distributed ledger technology for information sharing. Government Information Quarterly. 34, 3 (Oct. 2017), 355–364.

[47]

Peck, M.E. 2017. Blockchains: How They Work and Why They'll Change the World - IEEE Spectrum. IEEE Spectrum.

[48]

Pilkington, M. 2015. Blockchain Technology: Principles and Applications. Research Handbook on Digital Transformations. F.X. Olleros and M. Zhegu, eds. Edward Elgar. 1–39.

[49]

Pina, V. 2007. Are ICTs improving transparency and accountability in the EU regional and local governments? An empirical study. Public Administration. 85, 2 (Jun. 2007), 449–472.

[50]

Piotrowski, S.J. 2007. Governmental transparency in the path of administrative reform. State University of New York Press.

[51]

Roberts, N.C. 2002. Keeping Public Officials Accountable through Dialogue: Resolving the Accountability Paradox. Public Administration Review. 62, 6 (Nov. 2002), 658–669.

[52]

Romzek, B.S. 2000. Dynamics of Public Sector Accountability in an Era of Reform. International Review of Administrative Sciences. 66, 1 (Mar. 2000), 21–44.

[53]

Smart Contracts: 1994. http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/rob/Courses/InformationInSpeech/CDROM/Literature/LOTwinterschool2006/szabo.best.vwh.net/smart.contracts.html. Accessed: 2018-05-16.

[54]

Sullivan, C. and Burger, E. 2017. E-residency and blockchain. Computer Law and Security Review. 33, 4 (Aug. 2017), 470–481.

[55]

Sumanjeet 2015. Institutions, Transparency, and Economic Growth. Emerging Economy Studies. 1, 2 (Nov. 2015), 188–210.

[56]

Tasca, P. 2017. Ontology of Blockchain Technologies. Principles of Identification and Classification. SSRN Electronic Journal. (May 2017).

[57]

Upgrading blockchains: Smart contract use cases in industry | Deloitte Insights: 2016. https://www2.deloitte.com/insights/us/en/focus/signals-for-strategists/using-blockchain-for-smart-contracts.html. Accessed: 2018-09-03.

[58]

Vance, A. 2013. Using Accountability to Reduce Access Policy Violations in Information Systems. Journal of Management Information Systems. 29, 4 (Apr. 2013), 263–290.

[59]

Vos, J. 2016. Blockchain-based Land Registry: Panacea, Illusion or Something in Between?

[60]

Williams, A. 2015. A global index of information transparency and accountability. Journal of Comparative Economics. 43, 3 (Aug. 2015), 804–824.

[61]

Yeoh, P. 2017. Regulatory issues in blockchain technology. Journal of Financial Regulation and Compliance. 25, 2 (May 2017), 196–208.

[62]

Zheng, Z. 2017. An Overview of Blockchain Technology: Architecture, Consensus, and Future Trends. 2017 IEEE International Congress on Big Data (BigData Congress) (Jun. 2017), 557–564.

[63]

Zhu, K. 2004. Information Transparency of Business-to-Business Electronic Markets: A Game-Theoretic Analysis. Management Science. 50, 5 (May 2004), 670–685.

Digital Library

Cited By

Celik BAbraham YAttaran M(2024)Unlocking Blockchain in Construction: A Systematic Review of Applications and BarriersBuildings10.3390/buildings1406160014:6(1600)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2024
https://doi.org/10.3390/buildings14061600
Punia AGulia PGill NIbeke EIwendi CShukla P(2024)A systematic review on blockchain-based access control systems in cloud environmentJournal of Cloud Computing: Advances, Systems and Applications10.1186/s13677-024-00697-713:1Online publication date: 30-Sep-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1186/s13677-024-00697-7
Švarcmajer MKöhler MLukić I(2024)Smart Contracts for Political Transparency: A Blockchain Approach to Campaign Promise Fulfillment Monitoring2024 23rd International Symposium INFOTEH-JAHORINA (INFOTEH)10.1109/INFOTEH60418.2024.10496003(1-6)Online publication date: 20-Mar-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/INFOTEH60418.2024.10496003
Show More Cited By

Recommendations

Transparency and Accountability After 2015: e-Parliament for Citizens' Engagement in the Ghanaian Environment
ICEGOV '15-16: Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Electronic Governance

Beyond providing information, Information and Communication Technology (ICT) really contributes to citizens' participation to public debate. With the use of ICT, Civil societies have played a big role especially in the areas of training, research, ...
Achieving Corruption-Transparency in Service Governance Processes with Blockchain-Technology Based e-Participation
Web Engineering
Abstract
Corruption takes place in public procurement by public servants through intermediaries due to the use of centralized systems and complicated processes. Blockchain and Web3 has the potential to remove these intermediaries, instead allowing ...
Towards Improving Accountability in Sensitive-Disclosure Scenarios
EICC '24: Proceedings of the 2024 European Interdisciplinary Cybersecurity Conference

Public transparency has become increasingly important to uphold trust in government agencies and private companies alike, e.g., by establishing police accountability and proving abiding to ethical supply chain practices. Oftentimes, however, this public ...

Comments

Please enable JavaScript to view thecomments powered by Disqus.

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Other conferences

dg.o '19: Proceedings of the 20th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research

June 2019

533 pages

ISBN:9781450372046

DOI:10.1145/3325112

Copyright © 2019 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 18 June 2019

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article
Research
Refereed limited

Conference

dg.o 2019

dg.o 2019: 20th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research

June 18 - 20, 2019

Dubai, United Arab Emirates

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 150 of 271 submissions, 55%

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

43
Total Citations
View Citations
1,102
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)204
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)33

Reflects downloads up to 25 Dec 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Celik BAbraham YAttaran M(2024)Unlocking Blockchain in Construction: A Systematic Review of Applications and BarriersBuildings10.3390/buildings1406160014:6(1600)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2024
https://doi.org/10.3390/buildings14061600
Punia AGulia PGill NIbeke EIwendi CShukla P(2024)A systematic review on blockchain-based access control systems in cloud environmentJournal of Cloud Computing: Advances, Systems and Applications10.1186/s13677-024-00697-713:1Online publication date: 30-Sep-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1186/s13677-024-00697-7
Švarcmajer MKöhler MLukić I(2024)Smart Contracts for Political Transparency: A Blockchain Approach to Campaign Promise Fulfillment Monitoring2024 23rd International Symposium INFOTEH-JAHORINA (INFOTEH)10.1109/INFOTEH60418.2024.10496003(1-6)Online publication date: 20-Mar-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/INFOTEH60418.2024.10496003
Albanki AAlshawawreh NAbdeldayem MAldulaimi S(2024)Unravelling the Legal Framework for Cryptocurrency: A Comparative Analysis of Regulatory Approaches2024 ASU International Conference in Emerging Technologies for Sustainability and Intelligent Systems (ICETSIS)10.1109/ICETSIS61505.2024.10459412(1-6)Online publication date: 28-Jan-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICETSIS61505.2024.10459412
Rakibul Hasan MKashem MTahsin ARonju M(2024)A Secure Vehicle Registration and Authentication System Using Distributed Blockchain Technology2024 3rd International Conference on Advancement in Electrical and Electronic Engineering (ICAEEE)10.1109/ICAEEE62219.2024.10561713(1-5)Online publication date: 25-Apr-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICAEEE62219.2024.10561713
Deng YSun Y(2024)How does the usage of artificial intelligence affect felt administrative accountability of street-level bureaucrats? The mediating effect of perceived discretionPublic Management Review10.1080/14719037.2024.2370982(1-21)Online publication date: 27-Jun-2024
https://doi.org/10.1080/14719037.2024.2370982
Ohri PDaniel ANeogi SMuttoo S(2024)Blockchain-based security framework for mitigating network attacks in multi-SDN controller environmentInternational Journal of Information Technology10.1007/s41870-024-01933-8Online publication date: 17-Jun-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/s41870-024-01933-8
Matey SRaut DRaut RKant R(2024)Blockchain Technology Adoption in Manufacturing Industries—A Bibliometric Review Using VOSviewerJournal of The Institution of Engineers (India): Series C10.1007/s40032-024-01082-8Online publication date: 19-Sep-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/s40032-024-01082-8
Xanthopoulou PAntoniadis ISaprikis V(2024)Digital reforms in the Greek public sector: using block chain technologies and social media for open governance and value creationInternational Review on Public and Nonprofit Marketing10.1007/s12208-024-00402-zOnline publication date: 25-Apr-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/s12208-024-00402-z
Goyal JAhmed MGopalani DBano DChoudhary A(2024)Cemetery Allocation Management System Using Ethereum BlockchainData Science and Applications10.1007/978-981-99-7814-4_10(113-125)Online publication date: 25-Feb-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-7814-4_10
Show More Cited By

View Options

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

HTML Format

View this article in HTML Format.

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Table of Contents