Understanding decentralized civic engagement: Focus on peer-to-peer and blockchain-driven perspectives on e-participation

Abstract

Decentralized civic engagement, i.e. engagement which is not initiated and managed by government, has been often used as a popular slogan in various public speeches to highlight the importance of genuine civic interests in governance, yet offering very limited options on how to actually promote such involvement. The advent of the digital era has facilitated the development of a plethora of digital participatory platforms that could presumably help to boost the effective engagement of civic communities in decision making processes in an explicitly decentralized manner and, more so, the demand for such decentralized e-participation services is increasing during the current Covid-19 crisis. However, there is a real shortage of studies that directly focus on the analysis of such autonomous cases and all the more so from real life contexts in their natural settings. In this regard, this paper aims to fill the gap by analyzing the phenomena from an intrinsically peer-to-peer networking perspective, which could be observed today in popular autonomous civic engagement initiatives that have been launched in recent times in the area.