Governance in DAOs: Lessons in Composability from Primate Societies and Modular Software
Published in MIT Computational Law Report (Author: Renita Murimi), 2022
Governance, in its various forms, strives to solve the resource allocation problem in resource-constrained societies. Decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) have emerged as a new kind of institution, that seeks to leverage the decentralized nature of the underlying blockchain in its governance mechanisms. This paper offers a framework for composable governance, where key elements of consensus, cooperation, and conflict regulation are designed for reuse across domains. Our framework for composable governance draws inspiration from two sources: the governance mechanisms of primate societies, and modular structure of service-oriented architectures and object-oriented programming. The work in this paper raises important questions about the parallels between DAOs and conventional business and legal institutions, while emphasizing the role of the social relationships – consensus, cooperation, and conflict regulation – in creating frameworks that stand the test of emerging technologies.