A COMPREHENSIVE FRAMEWORK FOR EVALUATING DIGITAL ENERGY TRADING PLATFORMS IN STRATEGIC CORRIDORS: THE CASE OF THE RUSSIA-PERSIAN GULF ENERGY CORRIDOR

The digitalization of the world energy markets overlap with the geopolitical strategic realities in complexities especially in the essential energy corridors where national security, economic interests, and technological capabilities come together. This paper constructs and introduces the DESTRICS framework (Digital Energy Strategic Trade Corridor Platform Assessment Framework) as a six-dimensional analytical framework that was explicitly developed and intended to evaluate the viability, design and implementation issues in digital energy trading platforms within geopolitically sensitive corridors. The study concentrates on the Russia-Persian Gulf energy axis, which jointly controls close to 40 percent of the world exports of hydrocarbons and is a node of integration of both collaboration and rivalry, breaking the traditional techno-economic approach and including the critical aspect of transnational governance, geopolitical risk calculus, institutional structures of trust, and socio-organizational preparedness. The transfer of the DESTRICS framework onto the Russia-Persian Gulf route exposes a paradox in the organization of the structure, the strong technical effectiveness and the presence of strong economic motivators to integrate digitally are systematically negated by the overall lack of governance and internalized geopolitical confrontations. The first critical implementation bottleneck observed in our multidimensional assessment (critical trust gap) has a low score (1.8 on a 5-point readiness scale), whereas the governance and geopolitical dimensions are alarmingly low (2.1 and 1.8, respectively). This result is an argument against the common views of technological determinism in digitalization of the energy sector, and a reminder that politics and institutions are more important in strategic corridors. This analysis also shows that technology, instead of being outside political borders as it is mainly assumed to be, has, in many cases, increased institutional vulnerability and fears of sovereignty. As a result, the design of platforms should be redefined on a fundamental level as a practice of innovative institutional design and not as a technical practice. This study is theoretically and practically relevant due to the following reasons: (1) it creates a new assessment framework that will be used in strategic energy corridors; (2) it offers an empirical analysis of the Russia-Persian Gulf case with an integrated Russian academic point of view; (3) it suggests a new strategy of implementation in phases based on mini-lateral trust-building projects; (4) it pinpoints new strategic functions of geographically central states as neutral hosts of digital facilitation entities.