Mapping Risk Strategy of Social Stability Risk Considering Causal Relationships for Energy Infrastructure Projects

Abstract

Social stability risk posed by energy infrastructure projects can seriously affect urban sustainable development. There is thus a need to better understand how risk strategies are designed. However, there is few considerations on risk strategy design by breaking causal relationships. This research innovatively explores social stability risk variables by content mining, develops causal relationships of the social stability risk variables via Fault Tree Analysis (FTA) method, explores core risk variables and critical causal relationships by social network analysis (SNA) method, designs and validates risk strategies. The findings show that: 1) From the overall risk network perspective, the risk network contain 8 core risk variables. 2) From individual risk network perspective, there are 75 critical causal relationships. The top 3 critical causal relationships contain: projects that destroy the cultural landscape would be regarded as threating national security, which often inspires demonstrations among the local people and the line betweenness is the largest (35.589). Traffic congestion by the project is the main reason to cause local small-scale public petition, and the line betweenness is 35.075. Projects that threaten the ecological environment often bring psychological rejection of the project by the local public, and the line betweenness is 30.837. 3) Two scenarios are evaluated in terms of basic scenario and the experiment group scenario. Compared with the basic scenario, risk strategies considering causal relationships have significant effectiveness. The overall risk network density has reduced by 35.22%. The clustering coefficients has decreased by 16.20%. Intermediate central potential has reduced by 9.49%. This study offers a good reference for project managers to complete the sustainable risk control.