The attached powerpoint slide set presents the highlights of the just-completed analysis from our study on the causes of legal and political conflict related to the development of international energy pipeline projects. A working paper will be available early next year when the first paper on the social movement findings from the work is ready to be submitted to a journal. Other papers are currently in the works.

We had hoped that we could complete this project readily quickly using only secondary data, but this proved to be wrong. It required painstaking primary data gathering about the levels of legal and political conflict experienced on each of the projects. We then carried out an extended analysis using the innovative, set-based, Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) technique pioneered by Charles Ragin to get these results.

Our data gathering and analysis in the parallel study of 15 water supply projects is now also almost done. We expect to have a presentation and paper/s on that part of the study available late in the first quarter of next year.

We are delighted with the early results. The results are counterintuitive and exciting. They dispel the commonly held planning notion that expanded early access for a wider range of stakeholders reduces conflict. We found that greater early stakeholder access could actually increase conflict during planning and construction phases, although the long term effect of this early conflict on project sustainability during the 35-50 year lifetimes of these projects in operation is unknown -- and might be beneficial.

From this research, we have come to believe that the governance regimes in place to channel and resolve these early conflicts and to surface and resolve the inevitable conflicts between stakeholders that will occur over these projects' lifetimes, as they are buffeted by local and global political and economic shocks, are the keys to their long-term sustainability.

We could not derive adequate information on the details of the project governance regimes from this study, given our predominant use of secondary data. This points the way to future, in-depth case study research that our research team is planning to launch on project governance regimes for these kinds of international private-public partnerships. We are now beginning to discuss this set of challenges with several of our econoics and political science colleagues to broaden our research collaboration on global private-public infrastructure development even further, as we attempt to understand how alternate governance regimes impact the long term outcomes for projects in this challenging new managerial, financial and political arena of "ad-hoc, devolved government authority".

This PFIIS grant served to spark what has become a strong, exciting, and ongoing collaboration between institutional and political sociology/water supply/public health/engineering/project management researchers. We thank the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies warmly for its seed research support to launch this exciting area of cross-disciplinary international research at Stanford.

We will post future publications about the project on our website as soon as they become available.

Collaboratory for Research on Global Projects. " 'Site fights' : Opposition to oil and gas pipeline projects in the developing world." PowerPoint Presentation, December, 2008. Stanford University, CA.

Posted by rjorr at December 5, 2008 6:13 PM