The online ecosystem is providing new opportunities for communities of like-minded individuals to organize and coordinate to reach common goals, regardless of geographical distance. Among those organizational forms, Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs), are leveraging blockchain based technologies for decentralization of protocols and users, allowing them to reach their common goals through self-coordination and self-government.
DAOs are being increasingly employed to tackle a wide set of challenges, including major social issues. In this case they are usually referred to as "Impact DAOs": among those, a specific subset is represented by DAOs addressing climate change and environmental challenges, or "Climate DAOs". Even if they only play a marginal role in climate change counteracting, Climate DAOs have huge ambitions, targeted strategies, and a wide set of possible applications: their characteristics (e.g., self-enforcing contracts, decentralization, automation, etc.) could make them a powerful tool to be employed for environmental safeguarding.
The aim of this project is to provide a deeper understanding of Climate DAOs' challenges and possibilities, considering the effects of technological innovations and requirements, social dynamics in non-hierarchical decentralized communities and Climate DAOs innovative organizational structure in the development of strategies for reaching climate-oriented goals, to foster Climate DAOs wider employment and how it relates with existing policies and regulations.
Contact:
Giorgia Sampo’, Ph.D. student (gisa@sam.sdu.dk)