Legitimacy Of Projects Research Articles

INSPIRE AND IGNITE: ENABLING FACTORS FOR EARLY TOURISM DEVELOPMENT IN SABAH, MALAYSIA

Community-based tourism (CBT) is renowned worldwide as a sustainable economic development and a means of improving rural communities' welfare and standard of living. Successful CBT greatly depends on local communities’ readiness and active participation in ensuring equal distribution of CBT benefits. This study investigates the readiness of rural communities to engage in CBT under the management of Moyog Agrotourism and Tourism Park (MANTAP), a locally empowered organisation. The theoretical concept is framed by social exchange theory and the tourism development model is adjusted to match the local context. The study employs a cross-sectional approach, examining native perspectives on the early stages of CBT development in upper Moyog areas. Using the qualitative method, the findings reveal substantial local support for the CBT development. The study underscores the importance of demonstrating tourism benefits early on, as well as strong leadership and project legitimacy, which foster credibility and access to tourism resources. Native people who can picture themselves gaining benefits and be part of the tourism planning show more apparent support for tourism development in rural Penampang areas.

The Black Anthropocene: and the end(s) of the constitutionalizing project

This article is written in response to the assumptions and objectives of a recent project coming out of Tilburg Law School, called ‘Constitutionalizing in the Anthropocene’, but can be read just as easily as a stand-alone piece. The analysis presented here is based on an understanding of the concept ‘Anthropocene’ as rejecting modernist ontological assumptions about a split between human and nature. The concept says that this split is fictitious and can no longer hold in the present context of ecological crisis. The project to constitutionalize the conditions of living in the Anthropocene recognizes the importance of this shift but, this article argues, fails to fully acknowledge the implications for law. In contrast, this article explores the alternative concept of the ‘Black Anthropocene’ as a (para-)ontological understanding and an ethico-political response that better captures the concept of Anthropocene, including the legal implications. Grounded in the concept of Black Anthropocene, this article demarcates two distinct approaches to relationality and to the legal subject. It then utilizes this framing to rethink constitutionalization as disavowing the imbrication of law within a modernist ontology of separation and, as a result, the possibilities for constitutionalizing the Anthropocene at all. The article argues that focusing on anti-Blackness as central to the modernist ontology of human and world opens other possibilities for thought, leading us to question, rather than seek to preserve, the authority and legitimacy of projects of constitutionalization per se.

Project legitimacy: Towards a theoretical framework

AbstractScholars have greatly improved our understanding of legitimacy and legitimation processes in recent years. Focusing mainly on organizations and institutional fields, mainstream organizational legitimacy theories assume that organizations are permanent. In so doing, projects—viewed as temporary organizations—like those involving natural resources and infrastructure development projects have been overlooked. In this article, our initial argument posits that a significant temporal distinction underpins the contrast in legitimacy between stable and established organizations and projects. We then develop and discuss two spectra that differentiate the legitimacy of a project from the legitimacy of the organization endorsing the project. Building on these spectra, we then theorize four interplay processes between the legitimacy of projects and the legitimacy of organizations: project reinforcement/degradation and organizational reinforcement/degradation. Our findings pave the way for new and unexplored research avenues on the legitimacy of projects.

Strategic responses to external stakeholder influences

When external stakeholders manipulate inputs and influence a project directly, managers need to respond strategically to keep the project moving forward. This study follows a grounded theory approach to establish a model of strategic responses to stakeholder influences. Results show that managers can take a negotiating or conceding approach while under external pressures. The former approach suggests countering the impacts, including four strategies: manipulating, persuading, bargaining and litigating. The latter implies that managers accept such pressures and attempt to keep things going forward, employing three strategies: complying, diverting and terminating. The ways that a manager selects response strategies are informed by eight factors: socio-legal environment; organisational characteristics of the owner; behavioural stability of input holders; characteristics of inputs; project adaptability; the timing of responding; project legitimacy; and the harmony of interests amongst the beneficiaries, affected parties and other actors external to the project. When dealing with pressure from input holders, managers can use the repertoire of response strategies as an aid to making timely decisions; they can also select the most appropriate strategy by examining explanatory factors from the macro to micro level.

Nature-based climate adaptation projects, their governance and transitional potential-cases from Copenhagen

This paper investigates and broadens the discussion of nature-based climate adaptation for storm water management and coastal flooding. Based on three Copenhagen cases of locally initiated innovative flagship projects and framed by governance and transition theory, we investigate how nature-based solutions can be understood in a real-life context, and how hybrid projects joining technical and nature-based solutions might work; the governance methods of such projects; and their transitional potential. The cases underscore the importance of nature perception for the design of the project, and the role of daily recreational users as crucial for project legitimacy. Innovative projects might seem local, but often they are embedded in larger strategies and serve to flesh out such strategies and might even change them in a longer perspective. New problems and projects foster a need for new types of partnerships, which can challenge co-operation. Finally, it is questioned how – and if – experiences from flagship projects can be anchored and mainstreamed into a new normal for climate adaptation.

The Dark Side of Projects: Dimensionality, Research Methods, and Agenda

This article presents the dark side of projects, engaging project scholars and practitioners in discussions about sensitive, confusing, uncomfortable, challenging, and questionable phenomena, such as corruption, sexism, money laundering, modern slavery, waste of resources, and organizational politics. The dark side impacts people’s lives, questioning the legitimacy of projects as forms of work organization and the political and ideological systems shaping the projects’ context. Project scholars and practitioners need to be aware of the harm the dark side of projects may promote. Ultimately, we aim to build awareness, promote research, and help sensitize our community to the dark side of projects.

Navigating the early stages of a large sustainability-oriented rural tourism development project: Lessons from Træna, Norway

This paper draws on data collected through multiple approaches and presents an exploration of the early stages of a large sustainability-oriented rural tourism development project. Through a streamlined qualitative analysis, the study revealed four tactical moves deployed in the early stages of the project. The moves include instilling project legitimacy, forging a support network, anchoring the project, and mobilising resources and capabilities. Further analysis revealed that these moves tend to reinforce each other, and thus they require concurrent implementation. Subsequently, the study develops a framework delineating drivers, enablers, challenges, and key success factors for navigating the early stages of a large sustainability-oriented rural tourism development project. Intriguingly, the study contradicts the path dependence perspective, which is often used in project management research. Instead, it suggests that the early stages of such projects require tactical path creation involving well-calculated actions that serve as a breeding ground for valuable random incidents.

Infrastructure Governance in Times of Crises: A Research Agenda for Australian Cities

ABSTRACT Planning should deliver urban infrastructures that nurture places and people. However, the misalignment between strategic plans and delivered projects reveals critical governance gaps, with little clarity surrounding for whom and what ends infrastructures serve. This positioning piece proposes an infrastructure governance research agenda focused on the integration of planning, funding, and social legitimacy of projects, and the reality of multiple ongoing crises. Most importantly, the proposed research agenda calls for a First Nation voice at the heart of infrastructure decision-making as part of the planning profession’s contribution to the Treaty process that Australia desperately needs to move forward.

Merchants Revisited: Long-Distance Traders and the World they Made

When faced with Esther Sahle's, Edmond Smith's, and Dane A. Morrison's recent books on English and American merchants, their activities, and their communities, a reader with any level of exposure to the field of early modern and early republic business history might legitimately ask, do we really need more? Historians have so completely associated early modern economic activity with merchant activity that many have deemed the period an era of “merchant capitalism.” The field is full of excellent studies and one might rightfully ask whether historians such as Jacob Price (Capital and Credit in British Overseas Trade [1980]), David Hancock (Oceans of Wine [2009]), Cathy Matson (Merchants and Empire [1998]), and Francesca Trivellato (The Familiarity of Strangers [2009]), among many others, have not plumbed the depths of the subject. Scholars of the Black Atlantic have also increasingly questioned the legitimacy of projects that continue to render the violence of slavery ancillary to discussions of business practice. To some extent, genuine historical engagement with merchants must reproduce the views of colonizers and enslavers to make the people whom it studies legible to modern audiences. This reproduction does damage as it illuminates, and business historians must engage this critique directly to maintain the legitimacy of their projects. In a crowded field with foundations that are seriously challenged by an emergent strain in this historical discipline, it is worth skeptically asking what three additional studies can add.

Asymmetric legitimacy perception across megaproject stakeholders: The case of the Fehmarnbelt Fixed Link

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.

How can we govern large-scale green infrastructure for multiple water security benefits?

AbstractTraditional, limited purpose grey infrastructure has failed to address the world's interrelated water challenges. Improving water security will increasingly require more integrated responses. This paper examines large-scale green infrastructure (LSGI), planned natural or hybrid systems that materially affect water security at the watershed scale, as one such response. This paper examines key challenges for governing and financing LSGI, which hinder its broader use. We report on four case studies located in the United States where LSGI is being employed to improve water security. Through analysis of these case studies and related literature, we identify three themes important for LSGI governance: cost sharing, performance monitoring, and legitimization. First, we hypothesize that formal cost sharing based on the multiple benefits LSGI provides could enable wider adoption, but find that in these examples cost sharing is limited and informal. Second, our research suggests that expanding performance monitoring to encompass key secondary benefits could help clarify how the benefits and burdens of a project are distributed across stakeholders, facilitate cost sharing, and enhance project legitimacy. Finally, LSGI will require further legitimization – developing a broader perception that LSGI is an appropriate alternative or complement to grey infrastructure – to develop as a viable contributor to water security.

The recursive interaction of institutional fields and managerial legitimation in large-scale projects

Heeding recent calls for more studies on the relationship between projects and institutions, this paper reports on a collaborative case study to shed light on the recursive relations of large-scale projects and their institutional fields. Given the industry as the field-level institution, this study explores how two project organizations experienced the industry changes, its influence on the arrangement of large-scale projects, and the management response used to legitimize these arrangements. The qualitative secondary data analysis of two High-Speed rail projects in Spain and The Netherlands is based on semi-structured interviews, observations, and document analysis. This paper provides the institutional fields’ contextual detail and deepens our understanding of temporal institutional complexity that bound large-scale project arrangements. The findings suggest that in both cases the management responses altered across time and evolved depending on the salience of the institutional pressure, through the interplay with 1) regulative, 2) normative, and 3) dynamic cultural-cognitive forces, resulting in cycles of project legitimacy.

Making the subsurface political: How enhanced oil recovery techniques reshaped the energy transition

Analyzing the case of France, this article aims to explain how the development of enhanced oil recovery techniques over the last decade contributed to politicizing the subsurface, that is putting underground resources at the center of social unrest and political debates. France faced a decline of its oil and gas activity in the 1990s, followed by a renewal with subsurface activity in the late 2000s using enhanced oil recovery techniques. An industrial demonstrator for carbon capture and storage was developed between 2010 and 2013 , while projects targeting unconventional oil and gas were pushed forward between 2008 and 2011 before eventually being canceled. We analyze how the credibility, legitimacy, and governance of those techniques were developed and how conflicts made the role of the subsurface for energy transition the target of political choices. The level of political and industrial support and social protest played a key role in building project legitimacy, while the types of narratives and their credibility determined the distinct trajectories of hydraulic fracturing and carbon capture and storage in France. The conflicts over enhanced oil recovery techniques are also explained through the critical assessment of the governance framework that tends to exclude civil society stakeholders. We suggest that these conflicts illustrated a new type of politicization of the subsurface by merging geostrategic concerns with social claims about governance, ecological demands about pollution, and linking local preoccupations to global climate change.

Quantifying local community voices in the decision-making process: insights from the Mount Cameroon National Park REDD+ project

ABSTRACTOne key component in community development is the ability to negotiate and make contentious environmental decisions that have sustainable environmental and livelihoods benefits. This study examines the community voice during the consultation and decision-making process to evaluate if the inclusion of community delegates is meant to legitimise REDD+ or leads to community development. Likert-scale questionnaire, focus-group discussions and interviews were used to collect data from 259 respondents located in 12 villages around Mount Cameroon National Park (MCNP). Results show that the level of local participation in the MCNP-REDD+ project directly relates to both standing and influence granted to the local stakeholders. Although MCNP managers understood community concerns, these concerns are not being addressed. Local community delegates are granted access to discussion forums, but they are not influencing the decision-making process or the design of REDD+ within MCNP. The voice of all stakeholders must be heard to ensure equitable development and socio-environmental legitimacy of projects. A decision-making process that is transparent and familiar to local communities will enhance their confidence to engage in debates as equal stakeholders and ensure that decisions reflect community consent. Capacity building in the decision-making process will empower the community to efficiently engage in consultation, dialogue and transparent forest management decisions.

Social licence, corporate social responsibility and coal seam gas: framing the new political dynamics of contestation

This paper explores the contestation dynamics between the unconventional gas mining sector and its challengers through the prism of the social licence to operate. Social licence is a dominant narrative in the mining sector today and as a signifier of the sector's CSR credentials, the term is an influential one. Its capacity to confer project legitimacy, and hence avoid the risks of community opposition, helps explain why most companies seek to gain one. Today both gas proponents and opponents talk the language of social licence: the former to defend their projects, the latter to challenge them. Yet, beyond rhetoric, the precise meaning of social licence remains elusive. This paper uses a case study of community opposition to primarily coal seam gas projects in an eastern Australian region to explore how the absence of a precise meaning for social licence has created a strategic opportunity space for the industry's opponents to invest social licence with a potent democracy frame. This democracy framing has proved particularly effective as a contestation tool and helps explain the outcomes in this case.

Kicking Off Social Entrepreneurship: How A Sustainability Orientation Influences Crowdfunding Success

AbstractResearch generally suggests that, relative to commercial entrepreneurs, social entrepreneurs stand at a disadvantage at acquiring resources through traditional financial institutions. Yet interest in social entrepreneurship appears to be at an all‐time high. The current paper advances the argument that an innovative institutional form – crowdfunding – has emerged to address the needs of social entrepreneurs and other entrepreneurs with limited access to traditional sources of capital. To examine this, we study whether and how a sustainability orientation affects entrepreneurs’ ability to acquire financial resources through crowdfunding and hypothesize that a venture's sustainability orientation will enhance its fundraising capability. We also suggest that project legitimacy and creativity mediate the relationship between a sustainability orientation and funding success. Our analysis produces two key findings: 1) a sustainability orientation positively affects funding success of crowdfunding projects, and 2) this relationship is partially mediated by project creativity and third party endorsements.

Légitimer l’implémentation d’un ERP: une comparaison Canada – Thailande

For more than 15 years, large, small and medium enterprises have been investing in enterprise systems. Gradually, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) turned out to become worldwide standards in information technology (IT) in most business sectors. However, a large part of these investments are associated with failing or counter-performance results in organisations. As a consequence, ERPs have a reputation deficit likely to jeopardise users’ acceptance. However, despite their potential reluctance and resistance, organisations continue to implement ERP, and in the Information Systems (IS) literature, there is a lack of research on the way to manage IT project legitimacy with stakeholders. From this perspective, the article identifies and analyses the decisions made by managers to get and maintain the support of stakeholders throughout the project to ensure its achievement. The empirical part presents and compares two cases studies in highly different sociocultural contexts: a North American university and a company based in Thailand. Qualitative data collected from the semi-structured interviews with the project managers allowed us to identify the way the ERP adoption decisions were associated to pragmatic, moral and cognitive legitimation actions. Then, the article introduces the legitimation trajectory concept as a key principle of change management.

La gestión del regadío catalán: entre eficiencia, compatibilidad de usos y legitimidad social

En los años precedentes, el regadío y su gestión han devenido protagonistas de un debate social que cuestiona los límites económicos, ambientales y territoriales de su práctica en espacio y tiempo. Las construcciones hidráulicas como los canales de regadío han ocupado un papel central en el intento de “dominar” el recurso agua y controlar así el territorio. Sin embargo y, con el paso del tiempo, tanto la modernización de regadíos tradicionales como la promoción de nuevos regadíos han sido progresivamente cuestionadas ante el auge de las demandas ambientales y la promoción de la gobernanza como mecanismo favorecedor de acuerdos entre partes interesadas. En Cataluña, la gestión del regadío debe hacer frente tanto a los requisitos de eficiencia como a la compatibilidad entre usos consuntivos y no consuntivos así como a la legitimación social de proyectos que sobrepasan el interés sectorial. El análisis de la realidad asociada a los regadíos históricos del Bajo Ter y de la Muga así como del proyecto en ejecución del canal Segarra-Garrigues enfatiza en la necesidad de promover un modelo de gestión territorial del regadío capaz de integrar y legitimar distintos puntos de vista en competencia.

Exploring entrepreneurial legitimacy in reward-based crowdfunding

Venture financing through social networks has become a global phenomenon. The processes and drivers of crowdfunding require careful study to identify similarities and distinctions from traditional venture finance. The demonstration of project legitimacy is especially interesting because online crowdfunding limits investors' access to the entrepreneur and organisation. How do rewards-based crowdfunding projects establish and demonstrate legitimacy in this virtual, impersonal context? We employ a novel data-set collected from the Kickstarter crowdfunding platform to explore the characteristics of successful projects, including legitimating signals and content. The data reveal numerous findings linking project characteristics to legitimacy and success. First, lower funding targets and shorter duration signal legitimacy by setting modest, achievable expectations. Rewards structures, such as traditional equity investment terms, appear to generate a sense of legitimate investment returns. Finally, narrative legitimacy in the online crowdfunding context may derive more from the online platform community than the visual pitch. Our study reveals a more nuanced picture of legitimacy formation during rewards-based crowdfunding, with implications for theories of resource assembly and the practice of venture finance.

The establishment of legitimacy: the case of international projects

PurposeThe establishment of legitimacy is one of the critical issues faced by international projects that involve a host of stakeholders and are implemented in challenging institutional environments. The purpose of this paper is to examine the establishment of legitimacy and factors that affect this process in the context of international projects.Design/methodology/approachA qualitative, multiple case study of three international projects conducted in challenging institutional environments.FindingsBased on a theoretical and empirical analysis of three case projects, the article identifies different strategies that may be enacted to gain project legitimacy in international projects. Furthermore, a set of propositions that describe the effects of different factors (the project's external environment, the project network, the process of legitimation) that explain the extent of the challenge faced by international projects in establishing legitimacy are developed.Originality/valueThe article sets the scene for theory development on project legitimacy. A better understanding of legitimation strategies and of the factors that affect the establishment of legitimacy in international projects advances research on project‐environment interaction and supports managers in proactively managing project legitimacy.