Governing Techno-Futures: OECD Anticipation of Automation and the Multiplication of Managerialism

ABSTRACT

How do international organisations (IOs) govern the present based on claims about the coming impacts of technological change? Drawing on primary documents and participant observation, this article traces how the Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) anticipates automation emanating from the growing integration of blockchain technologies in global governance. We find that promises of radical, rapid, and reckless automation advanced by promoters of Bitcoin and other ‘defiant’ applications of the technology are steered by this IO towards more incremental and carefully managed forms of automation. The OECD relies on two managerialist practices to anticipate “reckless automation” through the promotion of what we identify as “responsible disruption”. In combination, OECD practices of scenario building and shared orientation framework construction deepen and extend managerial forms of global governance today whose technocratic and expert-led nature limits democratic possibilities and perpetuates global inequalities.

KEYWORDS:

• Automation
• blockchain
• governance
• inequality
• international organisations
• managerialism
• Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development
• technology

Introduction

How do international organisations (IOs) govern the present based on claims about the coming impacts of technological change? Contributing to this special issue’s examination of how IOs authorise certain futures, this article illustrates how the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) pre-empts rapid, radical and reckless future ‘disruption’ emanating from applications of an emergent set of technologies, blockchain.

Blockchains, generally, are ledgers of digital transactions undertaken, verified and published within networks of geographically dispersed users or “nodes”. The original type of “permissionless” blockchain networks, of which Bitcoin is the most prominent, theoretically enable anyone with an Internet connection and computer or smartphone to participate in digital networks. Advocates of this form of the technology seek to remove human gatekeepers and active human managers from digital activities. In turn, they seek to “democratize” by automating away human-led decisions over user access and participation. Yet, experiments with such blockchain-based automation became consistently accompanied by scandals and crises (Campbell-Verduyn and Hütten 2019). Periodic problems with such forms of automation have been attended to by human interventions from the likes of coders and developers. The radical recklessness of such blockchain applications has also prompted growing attempts by range of governments and IOs to outline and enact a more careful and controlled path for the future integration of this set of technologies.

The OECD stands out from a growing crowd of IOs developing international standards for blockchain technologies (Reinsberg 2019; Campbell-Verduyn and Hütten 2021). The OECD founded a Global Blockchain Policy Center in 2017. It has hosted annual Global Blockchain Policy Forums attended by hundreds of technologists and policymakers since 2018. As part of a wider “Going Digital” campaign to steer digitalisation, the OECD has become a focal point for global debate on the future of digital technologies more generally. Its “Anticipatory Innovation Governance project” seeks to prepare policy makers around the world to confront the “complexity and fast-paced change” associated with novel digital technologies.¹ Blockchains are one of the two flagships digital governance areas of focus for the OECD, with artificial intelligence forming the other.

This article traces anticipatory governance practices through which the OECD authorises particular forms of future automation promised by blockchain technologies. We draw on more than two dozen official documents published by the OECD on blockchain technologies and another 240 OECD documents mentioning the technology.² We also rely on participant observations undertaken at OECD Blockchain Policy Forums in person in 2019 and online in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. We identify two anticipatory governance practices exercised by the OECD, scenario-building and construction of shared orientation frameworks. Together, we find these practices promote paths towards what the OECD sees as a future of ‘responsibly disruptive automation’ that foreground “permissioned” forms of blockchain technologies. More widely rebranded as “distributed ledger technologies” (DLTs), the type of future automation promoted by this form of blockchain is valued by the OECD for retaining human decision-making and management over who can participate in blockchain networks, and how. The effect of foregrounding DLTs and “permissioned” blockchains, we argue, is multiplying managerialism in both the present and the future.

Managerialism is the belief that organisations operating in wildly varying places and areas of activity can all be optimally governed through universal standards of management practices and expertise (Klikauer 2013, 1). Democratic governance here is typically regarded as a hindrance to the “efficient solutions” and competitive advantages provided by managerial practices promoting technocratic expertise in elite-led decision-making. Managerialism has been long advocated by the OECD. Generation of technocratic expertise is a standard policy framework for its members and non-member states alike (Alawattage and Elshihry 2017). The particular path to blockchain-based automation promoted by the OECD through its twin anticipatory practices in the present provides a veneer of neutrality and carefulness to what we argue is an anti-democratic extension of managerialism into the future. Anticipatory practices of this IO perpetuate inequalities by creating what strategy consultants have called “pockets of the future” (Githens 2019, 70) across non-OECD countries. In “pockets” spread across the Global South, permissioned blockchain experiments are trailed and tested in the present often by technologists and technology firms from, or with close links to, the Global North.

We develop these arguments over four sections. The first section specifies the novelty of ambitions underpinning permissionless blockchains that were originally developed to automate management decision-making rather than labour at lower ranks of organisations embracing this technology. A second section then situates our analysis in the social construction of technology (SCOT) tradition. We heed recent calls from Science and Technology Studies-influenced research in International Relations (IR) and other social sciences to more closely follow and “think with” the social actors constructing automation. This section traces how specific actors at the OECD authorise techno-futures through two anticipatory practices. A third section elaborates how OECD anticipation of automation multiplies the anti-democratic elements of managerialism and creates “pockets” of “desirable” futures in non-OECD states where experiments with careful and controlled automation offered by DLTs are promoted. Here we link existing studies of how OECD promotion of managerialism undermines democracy at the national level (Poutanen et al. 2020) to inequalities and deficits of democracy identified in the literature on IOs and global governance more generally (Chase-Dunn and Lawrence 2011; Fehl and Freistein 2020; Graz and Hauert 2019). A final section summarises and identifies paths for further research into anticipatory governance and IO steering of techno-futures.

Our analysis bridges studies of the OECD with the emerging field of blockchain studies, attending to the former’s limited consideration of how techno-futures are authorised and the latter’s limited engagement with IOs. We also bring recent International Political Economy (IPE) studies of the promotion of managerialism by leading IOs (Seabrooke and Sending 2020) and digital technologies (Moore and Joyce 2020) into conversation with literatures in critical geography, media and IR studies chronicalling how practices of anticipation govern by steering present paths towards particular futures (Amoore 2013, 2020; de Goede 2012, 2020; O’Grady 2018, 2020).

Automating management and managing automation

Blockchains, in contrast to AI, Big Data and other algorithmic technologies, are not as explicitly or as frequently linked to automation. While automation is often a central value-added claim to the “disruptiveness” of blockchain advanced by advocates and critics alike (Champagne 2014; Lotti 2016), what exactly is being automated by this technology typically remains underspecified. Blockchain promoters point to the technology’s wider potential for enabling “[t]he automated operation of huge classes of tasks [that] could relieve humans because the tasks would instead be handled by a universal, decentralised, globally distributed computing system” (Swan 2015, 30). Such automation ambitions are usefully, yet less frequently, considered part of inter-professional struggle between engineers at lower organisational ranks and management elites (Dixon, Hong, and Wu 2020). Blockchains, as one of the technologists who popularised their “permissioned” version puts it in a self-published book, are intended to ensure that “decision-making authority is part automated, in that it has specific rules that are followed without possibility of deviation” (Swanson 2014, 54). These rules are intended to relegate “human interaction and bias” to the “edges” of activity (Swanson 2014, 54). In other words, blockchain advocates attempt to move up, shift and “scale” the traditional stress on automating menial tasks of everyday workers (Moore, Upchurch, and Whittaker 2018) to the automation of management decision-making. In its initial form at least, as one leading blockchain developer puts it, the technology is intended to serve as a curb on human “mismanagement” (Jentzsch 2016, 1). Automating managerial decisions, blockchains grant their everyday users more “direct control” of the technology’s applications in the present and future (Jentzsch 2016, 1).

In targetting managers rather than everyday workers, initial blockchain automation ambitions stem from a deeper critique of efforts to automate labour at lower organisational ranks. The co-developer of a prominent permissionless blockchain, Ethereum, for instance once railed against “automating the bottom; removing the need for rank-and-file manual labourers, and replacing them with a smaller number of professionals to maintain the robots, while the management of the company remains untouched” (Buterin 2013). The original impetus for Bitcoin, the first application blockchain to a money-like “cryptocurrency”, was to automate what its developers regarded and still regard as corrupt human-centred governance of the crisis-prone global financial system. Published and circulated at the height of the most destructive global crisis since the Great Depression, the 2008 Bitcoin white paper advocates replacing monetary management by human-led central banks with automated peer-to-peer production of an ultimately fixed total number of money-like tokens (Nakamoto 2008). The intention here was, and to this day remains, removing human management over the issuance of money supply while maintaining humans in everyday monetary exchange between “peers” in the digital network. Similarly, initial applications of the Ethereum blockchain that arose in 2013 sought to automate investment decisions by removing human management (DuPont 2018; Hütten 2019). So-called decentralised autonomous organisations (DAOs) bringing multiple Ethereum-based “smart contracts”³ together are widely experimented with across “decentralized finance” (DeFi), a community that distinguishes itself against Centralised Finance (CeFi) by seeking to remove active human management over financial decisions. As one blockchain engineer puts it, DeFi “is automation of the business of banking: loans, investments, savings accounts, wills, collateral. Everything you do with a bank could be an algorithm and those algorithms will cut out the middle man” (Jeffries 2021). Blockchain technologies, in short, were originally developed and applied to automate active human management. Their initial developers sought to re-frame a traditional focus on automating labour in lower organisational ranks of activity in favour of automation of management decision-making (Dunn 2021).

However, in foregrounding management as the target of automation ambitions blockchain developers have not done away with managerialism. The dominant modality of contemporary governance, one promoted globally by the range of actors making up and surrounding IOs like the OECD (Allawatage and Elshihry 2017; Bislev, Salskov-Iversen, and Hansen 2002), managerialism advances a universalist claim. It holds that, regardless of the particular field of activity, management ideas and practices can overcome ambivalent, ambiguous, uncertain, and seemingly threatening conditions. Through “appeals to a human desire for ontological security and continuity” managerialism provides what IPE scholars Eagleton-Pierce and Knafo (2020, 768) characterise as “a deceptively simple premise: problems can be improved or even resolved if they are better managed”. Better management involves both of the following:

1. general instrumental rationalities that formulate “the most efficient relationship between means and ends” (Eagleton-Pierce and Knafo 2020, 769);

2. specific “methods of control operating at systemic, organisational, and individual levels” typically “concerned with functional specialisation, compartmentalisation, and the monitoring of tasks” (Eagleton-Pierce and Knafo 2020, 769).

The ambitions of initial blockchain developers to automate management is far from antagonistic to the central tenets of managerialism. After all, the automation of active human management tasks via blockchain does not automatically occur. A great deal of management goes into pre-coding and anticipating human decision-making in applications of blockchains. This set of technologies neither necessarily nor unalterably automates human decision-making in pre-set ways. As a growing critical blockchain literature has elaborated, the technology merely shifts the actors and sites of automation (Maurer 2016; Campbell-Verduyn and Hütten 2019; Hütten 2019). Coders and programmers make managerial decisions in the present to develop applications of blockchain that are intended to automate future management decisions. Applications like smart contracts seek to pre-code decisions, displacing future human management decisions.

Like other “platform technologies” (Moore and Joyce 2020), blockchains retain key features of managerialism, including its universalism and technocratic tendencies (Klikauer 2013; Eagleton-Pierce and Knafo 2020). For example, developers of blockchains emphasise how

their domain-specific knowledge translates into universal knowledge (“guys [who] are really good at what they do, and [who] think that makes them an expert at everything”); that all problems are engineering problems and that unsolved problems simply indicate that nobody as smart as they are has come along to solve those problems; that domain-specific knowledge is a kind of “elitism” meant to keep out true experts like them. (Golumbia 2015, 125)

How are the managerialist features of a technology like blockchain perpetuated by an IO like the OECD in its attempts to shape present paths towards future automation? Answering this question requires an approach sensitive to the emergent nature of blockchain as an evolving set of technologies, as well as the on-going mutual construction of technology and society. In the next section, we lay out and apply our approach for illustrating how the OECD anticipates a particular path towards automation offered by the technology and in doing so, multiplies managerialism.

Anticipating automation, multiplying managerialism

If blockchain is going to be one of the transformative technologies of our time, the OECD is here to make sure governments are ready. (OECD 2018a, 10)

Anticipatory global governance is defined in this special issue’s introduction as “transnational practices of producing, contesting and implementing global present futures” (Berten and Kranke 2022, 156). This definition overlaps with the OECD’s own description of “anticipatory innovation governance” as the practice of steering the present evolution of future technological change before a “new course of paradigm is locked in”.⁴ The OECD describes itself as amplifying certain “weak signals” of the future emanating from, and presently found in, particular niches of activity. The IO then attempts to heighten and strengthen these signals by rendering more widespread “objects and behaviors that are not presently common but will potentially have a great impact in the future”.⁵ It seeks to create what strategy consultants have called “pockets of future” in the present (Githens 2019, 70). OECD anticipatory governance assumes that “[t]he time to act was yesterday” and seeks to steer technological trends in the present to anticipate possible futures.⁶

OECD anticipatory innovation governance and anticipatory governance more generally revolves around decisions that have yet to be made and events which have not yet occurred. Despite our best efforts to anticipate the future, due to the myriad of moving parts involved, the future that comes about eventually tends to differ from our projections (Esposito 2011, 23–24). Attempts to herald a specific desired future involve decisions and choices in the present to enable the “right past for the expected future” (Esposito 2011, 24). Such present decision-making underlines OECD attempts to steer the potential for technological change to negatively “disrupt” entrenched organisations and governance processes. Balancing a need to harness innovation while simultaneously curbing their most radical elements, OECD anticipatory governance seek to promote “responsible innovation” that is “productive, responsive, and socially robust”.⁷ Its attempts to shape of trajectories of technological change and “disruption” can be usefully traced, we argue, through a social construction of technology (SCOT) approach (Manjikian 2017).

SCOT emphasises how the trajectories and implications of technological change are part of the socio-economic systems in which technologies are always integrated. Stefan Fritsch (2014, 119) argues that “[i]t is ultimately social actors who decide how technology evolves and is applied in various socio-economic contexts, opening technology for socio-political control and steering measures”. Such “measures” can be—and are—taken in the present to steer the technological futures of tomorrow. While still shaped by and “[c]oncerned with the material constraints of the present” (Swartz 2018, 88), these existing constraints can be regarded as neither fixed nor all-encompassing for socio-technological evolution. Even seemingly abstract processes like automation should “be understood through the various and fluctuating relations it holds within the broader circumstances in which it is situated” (O’Grady 2020, 2). Emphasising these contextualised socio-economic circumstances helpfully illustrates how the trajectories of technological change and its impacts often “exceed the designer’s projection” since, like all human actors, they cannot “foresee all the contexts in which [technologies] could be used” (Czarniawska 2004, 9).

Like other perspectives emanating from the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS), SCOT focuses on processes over outcomes. The interdependent and on-going nature of socio-technical relations underpinning the means of socio-technical change entails that the end results of technological change remain unknowable and never entirely pre-determined. SCOT-influenced studies typically study process in the present. Doing so offers more “concrete” scope for immediate analysis and insight, as well as limits speculation over fundamentally open and unpredictable future outcomes. Stress on the processes of attaining certain (shared) results are foreground in emphasis on the “untidy, uneven processes through which the production of science and technology becomes entangled with social norms and hierarchies” (Jasanoff 2004). Put differently, SCOT endeavours to “highlight the open-endedness of processes of technological development” (Leese and Hoijtink 2019, 15). This “open-endedness” entails continual opportunities for a range of social actors, including IOs like the OECD, to shape technological presents and futures through anticipatory governance practices.

Inspired by SCOT as well as IR, geography and media studies insights into anticipatory governance and automation, the remainder of this section traces how OECD anticipatory governance curbs what this IO constructs as radical, rapid and reckless paths to future blockchain-based automation of management by promoting in the present more careful and incremental application of the technology. We heed wider calls in STS and STS-influenced studies to follow how technology designers themselves consider and act in processes of technological change. Marieke de Goede (2020, emphasis hers) has for example called for “engaging the event or experiment on its own terms” in responding to the philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers’ “injunction to follow practitioners” and “‘think with' scientists and practitioners”. Recognising how experiments in automation are inherently socio-political, Amoore (2013) has similarly promoted tracing of the “iterative and experimental process in which the humans and machines feel their way toward solutions and resolutions to otherwise indelibly political situations and events”. Taking our cue from such calls and wider “translation” of STS insights into IR (Best and Walters 2013), we follow the processes and practices constituting a formal IO’s “temporary reification[s]” in the continuous organising efforts by a multiplicity of actors involved in its activities (Czarniawska 2004). Following “the OECD” here involves tracing the activities of myriad human actors, processes and practices that collectively add up anticipatory governance stemming from this IO. From its director-general and the formal bureaucrats to non-member states and private-sector participants in the annual OECD Blockchain Forums, we follow the activities of actors contributing to the anticipatory practices of how “the OECD” governs techno-futures in the present.

We first identify two specific anticipatory practices exercised by the OECD: scenario-building and shared orienting framework construction. Two subsections in turn show how both anticipatory practices work to foreclose what is characterised at this IO as radical, rapid and reckless paths towards future automation in favour of more careful and controlled path to future integration of “permissioned” blockchains. A third subjection then illustrates how, in anticipating radical automation in the future, OECD practices in the present extend what are equally radical anti-democratic and unequal tendencies of managerialism into “pockets of future”.

Constructing techno-futures

Scenario-building is a first anticipatory practice of OECD techno-future governance. Explicitly normative and inherently speculative, scenario-building generally seeks to “organize and categorize while affirming the openness of the future” (Anderson 2010, 785). As outlined in this special issue introduction, IO practices tend to oscillate between “opening up the future horizon” and “closing it down to enable the tackling of concrete transnational problems in particular ways” (Berten and Kranke 2022, 159). OECD discussions of blockchain is replete with subjunctive terms “may” or “could” in discussion of the potential evolution and implications of blockchains as an emergent set of technologies whose actual future impacts remain fundamentally uncertain. Yet this IO’s construction of anticipated future scenarios itself involves a particular process of closing down possibilities.

The first scenario elaborated by the OECD is one we identify as “reckless revolution”. This scenario is envisioned as involving rapid, radical and reckless integration of the original, open, permissionless version of blockchain technology that yield forms of automation removing human control to far too dangerous degrees. In undertaking technological change so rapidly and recklessly, this scenario is positioned as one threatening key existing governance processes centred around the OECD and its member states. Case in point is cryptocurrency and other “decentralized finance” (DeFi) applications of permissionless blockchains. These are regarded as disrupting not only financial actors like banks and auditors but also state monopoly over monetary policy. The breadth of such rapid automation-via-blockchain goes well beyond finance and involves an ever-growing array of non-financial processes at the core of state prerogatives, like identity management (Juho et al. 2020; Zwitter, Gstrein, and Yap 2020). For head of the OECD Global Blockchain Policy Centre Caroline Malcolm (quoted in Forkast 2019) such integration of the original, open, permissionless version of blockchain technology produced “counterproductive effects” when the “technology industry moved very far ahead”.

What is constructed as rapid and reckless “disruption” invokes fears widely prevalent in the 1990s that the Internet and forms networked governance would overtake state sovereignty (Perritt 1998; Slaughter 2004). OECD documents echo such fears, stressing how overly rapid blockchain integration could lead nation-states to “become increasingly irrelevant”, or to see their roles shift as merely “providing a platform and governance for decentralised services” (Berryhill, Bourgery, and Hanson 2018, 33). Once again, the original blockchain application to Bitcoin and competing cryptocurrencies is positioned as threatening established processes that ensure the security and stability of states. While frequently cited as exemplifying such threats, Bitcoin, however, is also downplayed as an inefficient and unworthy application of the “disruption” promised by blockchain technologies (Chandler 2018). Its inefficiency is emphasised in multiple ways: from the time taken to process transactions due to its peer-to-peer consensus mechanism to the amount of energy required for decentralised nodes in the network to verify transactions. Bitcoin is associated with popular depictions “as an environmental polluter, consuming massive amounts of energy and emitting vast amounts of CO2” (OECD 2019, 3) and as a payment method of choice for “‘dark web' markets” (Berryhill, Bourgery, and Hanson 2018, 7). Contrasted with these undesirable inefficiencies and illicit activities, in turn, are the vastly more efficient and legal applications of permissioned blockchains. It is this reformed type of blockchain technologies that becomes invoked as superior, more desirable and worthy of incremental integration in ways that support rather than undermine existing modalities of global governance.

We label the second future scenario constructed by the OECD as one of “responsible disruption”. Here more incremental and careful integration of permissioned blockchain reinforces and improves existing processes and institutions. Blockchain automation in this second scenario reinforces and expands existing governance practices through its much slower and far more careful integration. A great deal of effort by the OECD goes into conjuring this ideal scenario for achieving a future in which more beneficial “disruption” eminates from “controlled” applications of permissioned blockchain. Prominently emphasised in documents and speeches are the efficiency gains stemming from permissioned blockchain integration into everything from global supply chains to the international exchange of tax information, as well as from tackling money laundering to improving the efficiency development aid (Medcraft 2018). Longstanding former OECD Secretary-General Angel Gurría consistently promoted the integration of permissioned blockchains as a “digital toolkit” for extending, rather than undermining, existing governance processes:

If we are to create a policy environment that supports innovation, while ensuring that we mitigate risks and create a level-playing field, it is important that we establish an overarching framework of blockchain policy principles. Such a framework could provide certainty to the industry, and encourage innovation that advances the societal objectives that our communities demand. (Gurría 2019)

These and numerous similar statements reflect the preferences of OECD actors for an increasingly automated techno-future in which careful and controlled applications of permissioned blockchains support the expansion of existing managerial processes. In stark contrast to its first scenario of reckless automation, the OECD constructs a second scenario in which permissioned blockchain applications herald what is positioned as a more efficient version of the present.

The first anticipatory governance practice of the OECD is thus one of building future scenarios in which blockchain-enabled automation differs vastly in speed, breadth and desirability. In the first general scenario applications of this set of technologies replace human centred processes and organisations in an overly radical manner. A form of “reckless” automation is consistently positioned as threatening the human decision-making that prevails in existing organisations and processes of global governance. The original permissionless type of blockchain is positioned as automating far too quickly and too broadly; as challenging sovereign roles of governments in a variety of its key affairs, from money to personal identification. By contrast, the second main scenario constructed regards incremental and limited automation via permissioned forms of blockchain as far more desirable. In seeking to attain the scenario we “responsible disruption”, the OECD undertakes a second set of anticipatory governance practices that construct a shared orienting framework.

Shaping techno-futures

“Good actors”, OECD Global Blockchain Policy Centre head Caroline Malcolm stresses, need a “regulatory policy framework” that fits the “broader values of our community in mind” (quoted in Forkast 2019). The development of shared orienting frameworks is a second anticipatory governance practice in which the OECD governs techno-futures. Shared orienting frameworks provide IO members and non-members alike with collective direction on how to “properly” respond to what are constructed as the threats and opportunities technological change provides. OECD practices steer the enactment of “‘desirable' from ‘undesirable' visions” by “imagining a certain future and rendering alternative ones less visible or less credible” (Berten and Kranke 2022, 156). The elaboration of shared frameworks rely on “processes of imagination that are undeniably political because they shape and constrain action in the present” to yield a form what Marieke de Goede (2012: xxii) calls speculative security. Such security relies on a “logic of preemptive intervention” for addressing situations “in which there is the expectation of a radical or catastrophic threat that is nonetheless acknowledged to be uncertain and, to a degree, unknowable” (de Goede 2012: xxii). In the case of blockchain automation, the threat of “radical reckless revolution” is anticipated as the OECD acts in a manner more generally understood as

not strictly to prevent the playing out of a particular course of events on the basis of past data tracked forward into probable futures but to preempt an unfolding and emergent event in relation to an array of possible projected futures. It seeks not to forestall the future via calculation but to incorporate the very unknowability and profound uncertainty of the future into imminent decision. (Amoore 2013, 9, emphasis hers)

Imminence, in “imminent decision”, is identified in wider studies of anticipatory practices as a central process in which “emphasis is bestowed on attending emergencies in real time” (O’Grady 2018, 3). Both general OECD documents and Blockchain Policy Forum events continually convey a sense of urgency for present action to be undertaken in anticipating the scenario constructed of “reckless revolution” by enacting a framework for arriving at an automated future of “responsible disruption”. Threatening language is consistently invoked to coalesce members and non-members alike into taking present action. Former OECD head José Ángel Gurría (2018a) exclaims that “if we do not manage this transformation, it can significantly—even dangerously—disrupt our world”. To counter such threats of reckless and radical automation, pathways towards “responsible disruption” are promoted in a shared framework developed to “identify and share best practice for governments managing and using blockchain” (OECD 2018a, 10).

In laying the grounds for its shared framework the OECD, therefore, first clarifies threats by developing a third future scenario. Here what are seen as overly restrictive responses to blockchain threats are positioned themselves as a different type of threat, that which we label as “suffocated innovation”. This threat emanates from what the OECD constructs as inappropriate responses to the previously outlined scenarios summarised in Table 1. In order to avoid this third scenario, the OECD urges careful calibration of international policy responses in ways that avoid regulating too strictly applications of “disruptive technologies”. This scenario is thereby integral to the development of shared orienting framework that does not “remove the potential” (OECD 2018b, 3) for widespread efficiency gains from the automation that carefully controlled blockchain application promises.

Table 1. OECD scenarios for blockchain-based automation.

	Reckless revolution	Responsible disruption	Suffocated innovation
Role of private sector	Dominant	Primary	Subordinate
Role of public sector	Subordinate	Supportive	Dominant
Pace of integration	Rushed	Incremental	Slow
Outcome	Uncontrolled automation	Managed automation	Missed opportunities
Normative view	Undesirable	Desirable	Undesirable

Source: Authors.

The shared orienting framework for blockchain integration emanates primarily from the OECD’s Blockchain Policy Centre. According to former OECD head Gurría (2019), the Centre was founded in 2017 to serve as a “global reference point on the policy implications of this far-reaching technology”. To generate what it calls “blockchain-based solutions” integrated into global governance in a “safe and fair way”, the OECD recommends the generation and sharing of expert knowledge within and across member states. Urging regulators to distinguish “between public permissionless and permissioned types of DLTs” (OECD 2021, 9), the OECD (2021, 9) consistently warns of additional “challenges” and added “complexity” from efforts to apply the original permissionless form of blockchains. Public sector uses in OECD member states are strongly encouraged to facilitate the deployment of permissioned blockchains in more carefully manners to encourage more managed forms of “disruptions” (Lindmann et al. 2020).

Like scenario-building, this second anticipatory governance practice is a process that evolves over time. OECD activities since the founding of its Blockchain Policy Centre and subsequent Policy Forums since 2018 involve an extensive array of “stage setting” for members and non-members, marking the outcome of a half-decade of discussion (Malcolm in Forkast 2019). OECD members are consistently oriented towards a common manner of ensuring “proper” responses in the present to respond to the potential threat of overly rapid, radical and reckless paths to future automation. The shared goal is to strike a balance between what is perceived to be sloppy, overly rapid automation threatening processes core to member states’ remit on the one hand and overtly restrictive policies that threaten the efficiency benefits of technological change on the other hand. In achieving this objective, OECD members are to delimit shared responses to a common threat. These responses seek to fall in line with the stated mission of the OECD “to shape policies that foster prosperity, equality, opportunity and well-being for all” by providing “insights to better prepare the world of tomorrow”.⁸ In offering what is presented as a “benign vision of the future” (O’Donovan 2020, 261), the OECD shared orienting framework seeks a balance of widespread “anxiety” stemming from the “disruptive” automation with the efficiency gains from technoloiges such as blockchain. Yet as we proceed to argue in the next subsection, such OECD shaping of techno-futures has far from benign impacts in the present.

Anticipating techno-futures, extending managerial presents

In shaping paths towards automated techno-futures, OECD anticipatory governance practices multiply managerialism in the present. What we identify here as extensions of managerialism falls directly in line with this IO’s history of promoting homogenous managerial solutions to heterogeneous global problems (Godin 2004; Porter and Webb 2008; Sharman 2011; Schmelzer 2016). What we draw out here is the radicalness of anticipatory practices that seek to tame “reckless and radical revolution” by promoting “careful” integration of permissioned blockchains. OECD anticipatory governance practices multiply managerialism in the present in ways that, we contend, limit wider democratic participation by public authorities and non-experts, as well as heighten inequalities between its OECD members and non-members.

OECD anticipatory governance practices seek to pre-empt “reckless disruption” by extending the anti-democratic pathologies of managerialism in a first instance where public sector roles in innovation are radically constrained. OECD documents consistently seek to limit the roles of governments to light-touch coordination of market endeavours. The main role of OECD member states is promoted as enabling “efficient” knowledge production. In line with managerialism’s stress on “functional specialisation, compartmentalisation, and the monitoring of tasks” (Eagleton-Pierce and Knafo 2020, 769), OECD anticipatory governance prioritises knowledge production by specialised market actors that provide public regulators with “[f]oresight about future trends” in order for the latter to undertake “timely and effective regulation and supervision” (Akgiray 2018, 19). The OECD instructs public sector bureaucrats merely to ensure that “necessary building blocks” (OECD/ITF 2018, 7) be put in place for specialised private sector innovation and information transmission to efficiently occur. Both the production and sharing of knowledge are regarded as more effectively led by private sector actors and managed-at-a-distance by public sector actors. Public servants are called upon to merely facilitate alliance-building amongst the various private sector actors involved in blockchain development and trials. The former OECD director-general for instance emphasises the importance of continually “fostering information sharing between the policy and practice communities” (Gurría 2018b). At the same time, dialogue with technology companies is encouraged by the OECD for generating “awareness of public policy and regulatory concerns” in ways that guide companies away from developing “potentially unusable products” (Akigray 2018, 19). In order to avoid the dire “suffocating innovation” future scenario, the OECD promotes a radically constrained remit of public action in the present wherein governments merely set the broad foundations of more careful market-led “disruption”.

A second manner in which OECD anticipation of radical blockchain automation radically extends the anti-democratic features of managerialism is by promoting persistent reliance on experts. The OECD consistently lays out how knowledge production for “responsible innovation” with blockchain technologies should involve “users and other members of the public” and “devise multi-stakeholder models to balance expert-driven design” (Winickoff and Pfotenhauer 2018). OECD blockchain documents almost entirely reflect knowledge production by experts such as economists trained and based in the Global North.⁹ While granting a modicum of space to actors from non-OECD members like Bermuda or Serbia, OECD Forums largely represent very narrow expert populations. As Figure 1 below illustrates, representatives of financial services firms, consultancies, and the blockchain industry constitute nearly half of the speakers at OECD Blockchain Forum between 2018 and 2020. Representatives of civil society organisations, by contrast, are few and far between. A single union representative was featured over the three annual events. The non-profit segment, meanwhile, nearly exclusively represents members of largely elite educational institutions from the Global North. Forums are informed by a Blockchain Expert Policy Advisory Board that in April 2020 was nearly half composed of corporate actors, as indicated in Figure 2.

Figure 1. OECD Blockchain Policy Forum speakers by sector.

Sources: Authors based on three Forum programs, 2018: http://www.oecd.org/finance/financial-markets/OECD-Blockchain-Policy-Forum-2018-Agenda.pdf; 2019: http://www.oecd.org/finance/OECD-Global-Blockchain-Policy-Forum-2019-Agenda.pdf; 2020: https://oecd-events.org/blockchainforum%20/eventagenda.

Figure 2. Members of the OECD Blockchain Advisory Board by sector.

Source: Authors' depiction based on https://www.oecd.org/daf/blockchain/OECD-Blockchain-Expert-Policy-Advisory-Board-List-of-Participants.pdf.

Managerialist privileging of expert knowledge in other areas of digital governance has been shown to create “[u]nintentional barriers to participation” (DeNardis 2014, 16) in what can appear as procedurally open administrative structures. The barriers to more democratic forms of participation perpetuated by OECD anticipatory practices are less about “whose voices are allowed to participate but whose voices are able to participate” (DeNardis 2014, 16 emphasis ours). In limiting the possibilities for democratic participation, inequalities between the members and non-members of this IO are also extended. In its attempts to steer away from radically automated techno-futures, OECD anticipatory governance multiplies managerialism and radically perpetuates differences between its member and non-member states. Non-members from the Global South are featured in OECD deliberations insofar as they champion the managerialist modalities deemed necessary to attain the desirable scenario outlined by the OECD. This includes experimental pilots of the more careful and controlled techno-future promoted by the OECD with applications of permissioned blockchain. Such conditional acceptance extends inequalities between Global North and South in selectively amplifying and enacting certain “weak signals” of the future in the present. Representatives of non-member countries like Bermuda or Serbia participate in OECD technocratic deliberations only when trials of permissioned blockchain feature their jurisdictions as idealised “pockets of future”. For instance, a “Bermuda Standard” promoted at the inaugural OECD Blockchain Policy Forum as an desireable way forward in harnessing the “continued technological innovation of digital assets based on the trusted nature of Distributed Ledger Technology”.¹⁰ Seated next to then OECD Director General Arrugia, Bermuda’s Premier suggested that blockchain experimentation in this Northern Atlantic island should “serve as an example for how other states can help their populations achieve the OECD’s mission of improving the economic and social well-being of people around the world”.¹¹ How such a “mission” could be accomplished by an internationally recognised tax haven leading a “race” to provide foreign firms “shelter from regulatory uncertainty” accentuates rather than undermine global inequalities.¹² OECD member states are expected to learn from experiments in non-member state jurisdictions that “objects and behaviors that are not presently common but will potentially have a great impact in the future” (Githens 2019, 70). Meanwhile, lessons from non-member states harnessing blockchain for more radical or revolutionary scenarios, such as “financial autonomy” in China, Iran, Russia and Venezuela are persistently excluded from, and largely ignored (Campbell-Verduyn and Giumelli 2022). Highlighted by these inclusions and exclusions is the persistently radical degree to which OECD anticipatory governance seeks to turn “weak” signals of the future into “strong” commitments for how technologies like blockchain should be integrated in appropriate ways in the present. In multiplying managerialism into the future OECD anticipatory governance highlights tensions between claims of universalism and reality of persistent inequalities and exclusion between countries of the Global North and South in the present.

In sum, OECD anticipatory practices multiply managerialism in ways prioritising technocratic decision-making by constrained set of what Liam Stockdale (2016, 153), invoking Judith Butler, calls “mundane bureaucratised authorities, or ‘petty sovereigns’”. With cursory commitments to tropes of inclusion, empowerment and democratisation pervading discussions of blockchain technologies, OECD practices stress managerialist private-sector market expertise and light-touch public regulation. Shared frameworks developed for anticipating radically automated techno-futures obscure the radicalness of managerial tendencies in the present. Extending the anti-democratic and exclusive pathologies of managerialism is moderate only in comparison to the OECD’s constructed notion of “reckless disruption”. Seeking to assert “some degree of control over the unfolding future”, the OECD’s construction of blueprints for heralding a blockchain-based future extend what IR and wider interdisciplinary studies of anticipatory practices have identified as working to “undermine the constitutive principles and norms of liberal democracy in crucial ways” (Stockdale 2016, 163). Under the guise of universalist common sense notions of efficiency, the anticipatory governance by this IO sets what Amoore (2020, 4) laments are the “bounded conditions of what a democracy, a border crossing, a social movement, an election, or a public protest could be in the world”.

Ultimately, like blockchain itself, the lasting power of anticipatory governance practices of the OECD remain to be seen. As permissioned versions of the technology struggle to, as the OECD itself acknowledges, “satisfy sky-high expectations” (Lindmann et al. 2020, 19), new avenues for critique, for public debate and for participation may re-emerge to challenge OECD’s capacity to create enduring consensus on shared techno-futures.¹³ In exploring such avenues future research should continue to follow how the multiplicity of actors making up the deliberations of IOs attempt to shape techno-futures in potentially novel manners we briefly consider in the final section.

Conclusion

Science-fiction author William Gibson is famously attributed with the statement that “the future is already here—it’s just not very evenly distributed”.¹⁴ This is all too true, albeit for different reasons than Gibson suggests, in the case of the OECD anticipatory governance practices whose underpinnings and effects were traced in this article. Constructing scenarios and a shared orientation framework for “responsible disruption”, the OECD encourages incremental and more controlled management of automation offered by blockchain technologies. What is constructed as a threatening future of rapid and reckless disruption from permissionless blockchain automation is countered by a framework for “responsible disruption” to be enacted through careful and controlled permissioned blockchains. Such “careful” OECD attempts to stem radical automation, we argue, remain radical in their “multiplication of managerialism” in ways that extend technocratic decision-making by market actors in the Global North and experimentation in non-member states located mainly in the Global South. Our stress on the radicalness of OECD anticipatory governance lies in its extension of managerialism via attempts to anticipate radical automation through such an “uneven distribution of the future” in which market experts make decisions and experiments are conducted in non-member states. Instead of extending its alleged democratising tendencies, blockchain’s managerialism is extended in persistent OECD encouragement of private knowledge, light-touch public management, and expert-led technocratic deliberation that experiments with “desirable” forms of automation today often in selected regions of the Global South.

Future research, we believe, needs to further explore the role of IOs like the OECD in multiplying managerialist exclusions and inequalities today across international efforts to steer techno-futures. The various blockchain working groups of International Standards Organisation (ISO), for example, are particularly relevant sites for assessing how automation is anticipated in similar or different manners from the practices of the OECD.¹⁵ Future studies might also draw out further limits to both the managerial nature of anticipatory governance, as well as extensions of managerialism through anticipatory governance. For instance, how managerialist emphasis on market competition induces possible instabilities could be investigated in ways that extend our effort here to bridge IPE studies of managerialism and interdisciplinary studies of automation. Exploring how the perceived legitimacy of anticipatory practices and managerialism can be contested, moreover, can illuminate whether social constructions of technology may result in alternative paths to automated techno-futures. In particular, the selective and conditional acceptance of countries of the Global South in experimenting with particular modes of “responsible disruption” warrants more scrutiny. How these experiments play out, who is included and most of all, who bears the grunt if things go awry is important to explore and situate as part of generating a wider understanding of how IOs authorise particular techno-futures.

Finally, future studies of techno-future governance will benefit from considering ongoing social constructions not only of technology, but also that of global governance through technology. Particularly important is examining whether rather than altering the pace and form in which a widely shared techno-futures are enacted, anticipatory governance practices can also materialise forms of “democratically controlled automation technologies” (Walsh and Sculos 2018). What this study, in sum, hopes to spark is further interdisciplinary exploration of the roles and limits of human actors and organisations in authorising techno-futures.

Acknowledgements

For constructive comments that substantially improved earlier versions of this article we sincerely thank the anonymous journal reviewers, special issue co-editors John Berten and Matthias Kranke, along with Bernhard Reinsberg, Chris Clarke, Hans K. Hansen and participants in the EISA European Workshop in International Studies, Kraków, June 2019, as well as the “Authorizing Global Futures” virtual workshop, May 2020. The usual disclaimers apply.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Malcolm Campbell-Verduyn

Malcolm Campbell-Verduyn is Associate Senior Fellow at the Käte Hamburger Kolleg Centre for Global Cooperation Research University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany, and assistant professor at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands. His research combines a general focus on ideas and materiality with a specific interest in the roles of non-state actors, technologies and technical artefacts in contemporary global governance. He is the author of Professional Authority After the Global Financial Crisis (2017, Palgrave MacMillan) and editor of volume Bitcoin and Beyond: Cryptocurrencies, Blockchains and Global Governance (2018, Routledge).

Moritz Hütten

Moritz Hütten is research coordinator at Darmstadt Business School, Germany, fellow at the Center for Sustainable Economic and Corporate Policy (SECP) and PhD candidate at University of Amsterdam, Netherlands. His research focuses on the normative and social implications of blockchain technology. He has also conducted research in the field of banking regulation in Europe, and financial literacy. He was involved in several research projects at Goethe University Frankfurt and Darmstadt Business School, as well as the research centre “Sustainable Architecture for Finance in Europe” (SAFE).

Notes

1 https://oecd-opsi.org/projects/anticipatory/.

2 We elaborate on the procurement and coding of this material in the appendix.

3 Defined as contracts that “can be executed independently from any centralised operator or trusted third party … [and] are guaranteed to run in a predefined and deterministic manner, free from intervention by any particular third party [such that] … just like a vending machine, smart contracts can be said to be self-executing, with a guarantee of execution” (de Filippi, Wray, and Sileno 2021, italics theirs; see also Swanson 2014).

4 https://oecd-opsi.org/projects/anticipatory/.

5 https://oecd-opsi.org/projects/anticipatory/.

6 https://oecd-opsi.org/projects/anticipatory/.

7 https://www.oecd.org/sti/science-technology-innovation-outlook/technology-governance/.

8 https://www.oecd.org/about/.

9 For instance Blundell-Wignall (2014), as well as OECD (2018c).

10 https://fintech.bm/bermuda-premier-sets-out-the-bermuda-standard-at-oecd-blockchain-policy-forum/.

11 Ibid.

12 https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/29/technology/cryptocurrency-bermuda-malta-gibraltar.html.

13 A similar point has been noted by Büttner and Thiemann (2017).

14 While debate remains on the exact wording and placement, this version is the most popular iteration of the quote, see https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/01/24/future-has-arrived/.

15 https://www.iso.org/committee/6266604.html.

Appendix. Methodological note

OECD official documentation was collected in May and December 2020. The documents located consisted of 12 reports, seven working/issue papers, and six “OECD highlights”. To identify key themes and messages conveyed across these documents, we manually coded executive summaries when they were available. Two working papers lacking summaries and “highlights” documents were fully coded in two cycles using the qualitative data analysis software NVivo 12. In the first cycle, in-vivo codes were derived from the phrasing present in the documents. In the second cycle, we manually assigned document types and provided an overview of occasions and contexts at which the OECD discusses blockchain, covering both the depth and the breadth of its embrace of this technology. Figure A1 provides a breakdown of the OECD documentation consulted.

Figure A1. Types of OECD document consulted.

Sources: OECD.

Finally, we further coded manually gathered data from the programs of all three annual Blockchain Policy Forums hosted by the OECD between 2018 and 2020, as well as from the official OECD Blockchain Expert Policy Advisory Board. We assigned sectors to participants in Forums and on the Advisory Board in developing an overview of the composition of expertise and private-public interaction the OECD expedites.