Blockchain as a Foundational Infrastructure for Collaborative Logistics: A Multi-Theoretical Lifecycle Framework
Abstract
Collaborative logistics offers substantial economic, environmental, and operational benefits, yet many collaborations fail to endure. This paper argues that blockchain should be understood not as an efficiency tool but as institutional infrastructure that supports trust, governance, coordination, and organizational memory across the collaboration lifecycle. Integrating transaction cost economics, network governance theory, the natural-resource-based view with dynamic capabilities, and socio-technical systems theory with the multi-level perspective, the paper develops a lifecycle framework spanning emergence, viability, and evolution. The analysis identifies three shifts in collaboration failure modes: from trust deficit to readiness paradox, from opacity-driven to rigidity-driven governance failures, and from relational inertia to capability–infrastructure desynchronization. Cross-theoretical synthesis identifies governance inversion as a potential divergence between technically constituted governance and socially constituted authority. The paper theorizes a potentially non-monotonic trajectory of governance effectiveness, in which reductions in monitoring and enforcement costs may be offset by adaptation, legitimacy, and governance-alignment costs as collaboration evolves. This bounded effectiveness thesis highlights the conditions under which blockchain may support or constrain collaborative governance. Four managerial recommendations and fifteen diagnostic questions provide a structured basis for deployment assessment, helping bridge the gap between optimization models and the organizational realities of collaborative logistics.