Exploring socio-technical facilitators of blockchain adoption in agri-food value chains: an interpretive structural modelling (ISM) approach

Blockchain technology has significant potential to promote transparency, efficiency, and sustainability in the agricultural sector. However, successful implementation depends not only on the availability of technology but also on organizational readiness, infrastructure, and coordinated effort among stakeholders. This paper identifies the key facilitators that support the adoption of blockchain across agri-food value chains spanning farm-level precision-agriculture practices and downstream supply-chain operations and analyzes the interdependencies among them. A literature review identified ten Facilitators of Blockchain Adoption (FBA), which were reviewed and validated by a panel of five experts spanning academia, agro-industry, farming, non-governmental organizations, and information technology. The interrelationships among these facilitators were analyzed using Interpretive Structural Modelling (ISM), a structural method for organizing expert judgments about pairwise influence into a hierarchical model; ISM does not estimate causal effect size or statistical significance. Applying transitivity consistently to the expert-derived reachability matrix revealed that nine of the ten facilitators form a single, tightly interdependent cluster, while enhancing trust among stakeholders emerges as the sole outcome-level factor at the apex of the hierarchy. A complementary MICMAC analysis confirms that these nine facilitators exhibit both high driving power and high dependence power (a “linkage” profile), indicating that the blockchain-adoption system is mutually reinforcing rather than governed by a small set of independent root causes. These findings suggest that ICT infrastructure, stakeholder collaboration, shared responsibility, service quality, auditability, usability, and fast-payment capability function together as a coupled socio-technical system that ultimately builds stakeholder trust. The results can inform extension professionals, educators, policymakers, and technology developers seeking to prioritize interventions that support a more coordinated and sustainable introduction of blockchain into agri-food value chains.