Application areas and potential benefits of blockchain-smart contract in infrastructure Public-private partnership (PPP) projects

Public-private partnerships (PPP) have gained increased patronage by governments in both developed and developing nations. Governments leverage PPP to utilise the private sector's technical strength and capital to improve value for money (VfM) delivery to their citizenry through the provision of mega, long-term infrastructure projects. However, PPP projects have continued to suffer from failures, early termination, and re-municipalisation due to failure to meet projects and stakeholders' performance expectations. Poor quality, lack of trust and transparency by the parties, skewed risk allocation, fraud in contractor selection, poor contract compliance, and inability to enforce bill payment by end-users have led to strained relationships between the public and private sectors and the ultimate termination of contracts. Blockchain and smart contracts possess unique features that can mitigate some of these problems and lead to improved and sustainable performance of PPP projects. While studies on the digitalisation of PPP contracts in the built environment are limited to BIM technology, adopting Blockchain and smart contracts in PPP projects is a scanty and underexplored domain. This study, via a questionnaire survey, examined the application areas and potential benefits of blockchain-smart contracts in infrastructure PPP projects. Relevant data were collected from experienced built environment experts using the snowball sampling technique, and the data were analysed using appropriate descriptive statistical tools. The leading application areas of blockchain-smart contracts are (1) Payment and financial administration, (2) Data and Information management, (3) supply chain management, and (4) dispute resolution and management. Prominent potential benefits of blockchain-smart contracts are (i) Decentralisation of payments and other transactions, (ii) prevent misapplication of contractual provisions, (iii) improved interoperability in data exchange, and (iv) better project resources management. This report is part of an ongoing PhD research that would provide a framework for the digitalisation of infrastructure PPP contracts.