Understanding multiple crises unfolding within megaprojects: Crises’ interdependencies, responses, and outcomes

Abstract

This paper adopts a processual perspective to understand how multiple crises evolve and interact in projects. After reviewing the literature on crises in projects and finding that it typically considers crises in isolation, we endeavored to study the case of an infrastructural megaproject that involved the construction of a high-speed railway in Italy to understand how crises interact and how this conditions the effectiveness of crisis management approaches. Through an exploratory qualitative study based on semi-structured interviews and secondary data, our work sheds new light on the link between crisis interdependencies, crisis management responses, and outcomes. In particular, our work unveils the temporal unfolding and interaction between multiple, diverse crises, which can be independent of each other or be linked by sequential or pooled interdependencies. Our findings underscore that crisis management responses that target crisis-specific effects can be successful in the face of independent or sequentially interdependent crises but can lead, at best, to midground outcomes when dealing with combined effects that result from crises that display pooled interdependence. Our results contribute to the literature at the crossroad between project and crisis management and represent a first step towards developing a theory that matches the complexity of crisis phenomena in megaprojects.