Stakeholders, issues and the shaping of large engineering projects

Social network analysis (SNA), supported by multiple software tools, has become an accepted methodology to document, visualize and interpret relationships among participants in an organization, community or other social network. Participants are represented as nodes in the network, with various kinds of social interactions _ for example, advice seeking or knowledge sharing _ represented by unidirectional or bidirectional arcs or “edges” connecting the nodes. The stakeholders in a large infrastructure project are drawn from public, private and civic sectors, and the stakeholders in PPP projects become more or less salient at different times during the life cycle of a decades-long public_private partnership (PPP) concession. This chapter extends social network analysis for large projects such as PPPs to consider both direct and indirect, open or closed social and economic value-flows and combines their effects in terms of the utility of each exchange relationship to the focal stakeholder. This allows a given stakeholder _ for example, a public agency, concessionaire or civic organization _ to assess its power relative to other project stakeholders, and to identify possible value exchanges with other participants to align their goals.