Governance of Multi-level and Multi-actor Systems for EU Customs Supervision

The vessels transporting the cargo can face change in itinerary because of various factors. The ENS documents are submitted to the customs office of first entry before loading the cargo onto the vessel. The issues that the customs faced were unavailability or incomplete Entry Summary Declarations (ENS) to perform the risk assessment because of the change in itinerary of the vessels. Due to this unavailability and incomplete ENS documents, it is difficult for customs to perform their risk assessment processes. This results in an inefficient process and incurs costs. Due to the growing amount of trade into the European Union, these issues cause a serious problem in the functioning of the customs authorities of the EU. In 2018, the PROFILE research project of the EU investigated the possibility of using blockchain technology for availability of information to the customs. The blockchain technology is a decentralized platform. In the PROFILE project it was examined whether blockchain can be used as a system to define access control to ENS data. Such a system can be seen as complementary to ICS 2.0 EU system that is currently being developed in the EU. Governance issues surrounding the blockchain-based platform arose such as who will develop the platform and be held accountable for the platform. The networked organizations around this blockchain-based platform consists of actors from the supra-national level (EU), national level (EU Member States) and business organizations (ocean carriers). Since the goals of these actors are different (carriers are interested in monetary profits and one of the interests of customs authorities is safety), a governance solution for multi-level network of actors to form a collaboration is required. Thus, the objective of this research is to look for a governance solution that enables multiple actors to join forces and form a collaboration. The research question that has been formulated for this research is: What governance solution can enable the collaboration of multiple organizations to develop blockchain technology for EU customs supervision? A collective network of customs organisations comes with its own challenges like who is in charge of governance, and legal barriers specific to countries associated. Governance solution is required to ensure smooth collaboration.Complex Systems Engineering and Management (CoSEM