Digital transformation in local government organisations: empirical evidence from blockchain initiatives

Local government organisations are the first contact between the citizen and state authorities. However, the rapid technological development in the private sector raises questions on how public actors can keep up. Seeking improvement, local governments undergo the process of digital transformation (DT). This encompasses a variety of processes and initiatives, including experimenting with new technological solutions. We focus here on experiments on one of these emerging technologies: blockchain. We report the results of a multi-case study investigating the DT processes that experiment with blockchain technology in three municipalities in Western Europe. We present our theoretical perspective (institutional logics and digital transformation), describe our qualitative comparative case methodology that relies on key-respondent interviews, and discuss our distilled categorisation of three activities (including excerpts from data).