Blockchain governance: innovating sustainable energy financing in Global South

Abstract

This paper focuses on the role of the blockchain as a socio-technical system capable of enabling decentralised governance mechanisms to provide private and commons-based solutions. Our contention is that such socio-technical arrangements can contribute to fund, deploy and interconnect the expansion of renewable energy through blockchain-based trust and coordination. Drawing on the examples of Sun Exchange company -- a paradigmatic example in South Africa -- and the DAISEE, a commons-based initiative in France -- this paper analyses dimensions of blockchain governance within the non-state law literature. Both examples show how private and common-based initiatives supported by blockchain’s decentralised governance, cryptocurrencies and, enabling business models are overcoming finance and institutional barriers across the globe. In this regard, blockchain technologies illustrate both the opportunities and challenges of emerging, decentralised governance systems where top-down forms of control (such as state control) are weak or missing. In this specific context, emergent properties from the repeated interactions of agents in the blockchain ecosystem can coalesce into patterns and codify into rules without the need of a hierarchy (lex cryptographia). From this standpoint, blockchain systems and its governance might be considered as a new type of customary law in the making. These processes also entail new socio-legal challenges in terms, for example, of conflict scenarios (breach of rules and codes), legal identities, or legal responsibilities.