Abstract
With further emancipation of once subdued or marginalized stakeholders, a growing number of megaprojects face increasingly significant social resistance. Asymmetries of support for the projects emerge, rooted in different perceptions of legitimacy across different stakeholder groups. In this paper, we ask how these diverging perceptions of legitimacy develop across stakeholders of cross-border megaprojects. We conduct a multi-site ethnography at one of the biggest contemporary cross-border transport megaprojects in the world – the Danish/German Fehmarnbelt Fixed Link. Tying together three streams of the legitimacy literature in a new analytical approach, we suggest three dimensions of project legitimacy perception: trust, majority, and morality. In doing so, we provide a new integrative model of legitimacy perception in megaprojects. We illustrate how these legitimacy dimensions dynamically interact. We thus provide new insights on how project legitimacy is continuously renegotiated in megaprojects with implications for future developments of project governance.
Highlights
Public governance has seen a trend toward further emancipation of disadvantaged stakeholders, and an erosion of traditional decisionmaking hierarchies or dedicated power clusters (Osborne, 2010; Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2017; Torfing et al, 2020)
Our research investigates the formation of legitimacy perceptions of stakeholders in cross-border megaprojects, following the case of the Danish-German Fehmarnbelt Fixed Link project
We found that stakeholders test the legitimacy of the project/opposition against three dimensions: first, trust in the acting organisations or institutions; second, support for the project/opposition through the social or political environment; third adherence of the project/opposition and its execution to norms and expectations
Summary
Public governance has seen a trend toward further emancipation of disadvantaged stakeholders, and an erosion of traditional decisionmaking hierarchies or dedicated power clusters (Osborne, 2010; Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2017; Torfing et al, 2020). New emphasis on trust and transparency, and greater attention to bottom-up initiatives (Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2017) have run in parallel to open-system thinking about projects (Dimitriou et al, 2013; Engwall, 2003; Witz and Oehmen, 2018). This recent rise of networks and preference for horizontally shared control questions legitimacy of megaprojects initiated and pursued by once dominant stakeholders – typically central governments or large corporations. Recent evidence suggests that project governance - at least when large public megaprojects are concerned - has followed suit (Aaltonen, 2013; Melé and Armengou, 2016)
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