Megaprojects: a meandering journey towards a theory of purpose, value creation and value distribution

This paper departs from a reflection of how my time as a doctoral student in the late nineties with the lean construction group at U.C. Berkeley influenced my (ongoing) research journey. I first recall how those early years led to my core empirical and theoretical interests on the management of ‘megaprojects’ - the project-based, multi-party contexts that are set up by one or more organisational actors with the aim of developing capital-intensive, long-lived infrastructure resources. I also analyse the challenges that I faced in the pursuit of a theoretical perspective with power to predict and explain empirical regularities on megaproject behaviour, and thus capable of illuminating the pervasiveness of major cost and schedule slippages as well as scope creep. As well as this, I discuss how the discovery of Elinor Ostrom’s commons governance theory was a watershed in my research journey. Then, drawing from organisational governance literature, I introduce and illustrate a model of the evolution of the governance structure of a megaproject over the project life cycle. I harness this model to draw inferences on megaproject organisational boundaries, on megaproject behaviour, and on how megaprojects create both economic and social value. Further, after conceptualising a megaproject as a purposeful interorganizational form of organising capital production, I discuss feedback loops and contingency variables that affect the gap between intended and realised project behaviour. I conclude with a discussion on how to leverage an organisational perspective of megaprojects to realise the potential of capital investment in new infrastructure to create value, as well as to engender trust in megaprojects, and thus mend their fractured relationship with society.Each era’s theories and prevailing arguments, in part, reflect the preoccupations of the times and coevolve with them1