Smart Contracts: An Exploration of Their Potential for Public-Private Partnerships

Public-private partnerships (PPPs) often follow long and complex design and implementation processes. During their execution, PPPs face problems relating to transparency and allocation of responsibilities that considerably affect their efficiency and effectiveness in achieving their objectives. New technologies offer the opportunity to rethink how to tackle these problems and find coordinated solutions for them. Technologies such as smart contracts, distributed ledger technology (DLT), artificial intelligence (AI), and the cloud are revolutionizing operations in different fields of the industry and have the potential to do so for PPP by replacing the current inefficient and highly expensive PPP productivity schemes. The objective of this analysis is to identify the opportunities that using these technologies offers throughout the different phases of PPP (from design to implementation). Based on this analysis, this paper establishes a theoretical framework that justifies implementing a pilot scheme that makes use of smart contracts, DLT, AI, and other new technologies in a PPP sub-process.