Toward Adaptive Governance for Critical Infrastructure Resilience: A DAO-Enabled Framework for Collaborative Crisis Management

Critical Infrastructure (CI) systems are increasingly characterized by complex interdependencies, cross-sectoral coupling, and vulnerability to systemic disruptions that can propagate across national borders. Traditional governance frameworks (hierarchical, centralized and compliance-oriented) struggle to coordinate multiple actors under conditions of high uncertainty, time-pressure and information asymmetry. This paper examines how adaptive governance mechanisms, and specifically Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) principles, can enhance decision-making, coordination and accountability in CI resilience management. We develop a DAOenabled adaptive governance layer integrated into an existing CI resilience platform and evaluate it through a scenario-based comparative analysis. A cross-border snowfall disruption affecting the Italy-Switzerland A2-A9 corridor is used to compare a conventional hierarchical coordination workflow with a DAO-enhanced governance configuration. The proposed model combines programmable decision rules, role-based and weighted voting, dynamic escalation and emergency override mechanisms within a DAO architecture. Results indicate that DAOenabled governance can reduce decision latency, improve traceability and accountability, and enhance shared situational awareness, while remaining compatible with European regulatory frameworks such as the CER Directive and NIS2. The paper concludes by positioning DAOs as adaptive governance overlays that can support hybrid human-machine coordination in safety-critical CI systems and outlines future governance and regulatory research.

Keywords: Critical Infrastructure Resilience, Adaptive governance, Collaborative crisis management, Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO), Coordinated decision-making.