A Unified Framework for the Governance of the Commons with Blockchain-Based Tools : An Application to Customary Land Commons in Ghana

In this paper, we propose an evaluative framework to analyse Commons governance situations that use blockchain-based governance tools. Our research builds on a relatively recent field of literature linking the work of Elinor Ostrom and blockchain-based governance and unifies different strands to propose an all-encompassing framework. In particular, we focus on the constitutional level and how decision-making rules are made. We show that they are formal resemblance between blockchain-based systems and the Institutional and Development Framework build on these similarities to provide analytical tools to practitioners. We then illustrate this framework with a fictitious case-study of rural land Commons in Ghana