Unearthing the Barriers to Blockchain-Enabled Smart Contract Adoption in Public–Private Partnerships Projects: A PLS-SEM and Hybrid Model Approach

The traditional public–private partnerships (PPP) contract is paper based, which makes contract documentation in PPP intensive, insecure, and prone to errors and unauthorized manipulations. These problems are in addition to many intermediates and associated negative impacts on productivity improvement and contractual compliance issues. Blockchain-enabled smart contracts (BSC) have unique features that suitably mitigate these issues when PPP projects are delivered. However, PPP stakeholders are confronted with certain barriers that impede the adoption of these technologies. Although interest in adopting blockchain-smart contracts in PPP is growing in the literature, a quantitative survey of global experts on the potential limiting factors to BSC adoption in the context of PPP is lacking. This study adopted a hybrid model of technology, organization, and environment (TOE) framework and institutional theory to critically examine the potential barriers to BSC adoption and implementation in infrastructure PPP projects. The structured questionnaire was used to gather data from 123 experts across countries, and descriptive analysis and partial least-square-structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) were used for data analysis. The descriptive analysis emphasized the significant limiting impact of the barriers to smart contract adoption in PPP. The PLS-SEM revealed that the six constructs of the hybrid model have a statistically significant limiting impact on the stakeholders’ decision to adopt and implement BSC in infrastructure PPP projects. This study provides a framework of barriers to guide industry stakeholders and policymakers in their quest to digitalize PPP contracts.