Research Projects - NGOs & Governance Study Project Proposal

View a Stanford Report article summarizing the project. Overview of the Proposal

Considerable progress has been made in overcoming the technical challenges of providing low cost, distributed infrastructure services in emerging markets. At the same time, the financial, political and institutional challenges of providing clean water and other basic infrastructure to underserved populations in emerging economies, often within failed or failing states, remain daunting and need new kinds of interdisciplinary research to address them.

Various approaches have been attempted to harness private sector finance and expertise for the provision of infrastructure in lesser-developed countries. Yet, few of the new legal, political and governance structures that fall under rubrics such as publicprivate partnerships, concessions, and build-operate-transfer schemes have fared well (Estache & Serebrisky, 2004). Clashes between "institutional logics" of emerging country governments, local workers and ratepayers, indigenous groups, multilateral development agencies, rich country investors, engineers and contractors have created overwhelming governance problems for the economical and sustainable development and operation of infrastructure (Mol, 2003; Mahalingam, Levitt & Scott, 2005).

It has been extremely challenging to create effective and efficient governance structures for delivering global infrastructure projects when their sponsors could identify, with some confidence, all of the public and private stakeholders whose interests they had to accommodate. However, the range of interests and concerns that must be addressed by the governance structures for global infrastructure projects have recently been made even more complex and uncertain by the emergence of a new group of "informal project participants" -- civil society organizations at local, regional, national and transnational levels, including local political organizations and a proliferation of NGOs with mandates ranging from global environmental and social justice concerns (e.g., CIEL) to regional ecological or social justice concerns (e.g., Amazon Watch) to NGOs with narrower sectoral concerns like preservation of specific wild rivers (e.g., Friends of River Narmada). These informal project participants can choose to mobilize their human resources and public relations efforts in support of, or opposition to various aspects of the desirability, feasibility location and/or configuration of infrastructure projects (McAdam, Tarrow & Tilley, 2001; McAdam & Scott, 2005).

The challenges of governance for these ever more complex projects are not being adequately addressed by current practice or prior research on public management, as evidenced by their dismal success rates (Miller & Hobbs, 2005). Nor are they being adequately addressed by research within traditional disciplines. A purely legal framework for identifying risks, allocating them contractually, and enforcing them through legal proceedings that are typically conducted in third countries and locally enforced, is widely acknowledged to have failed (Metzger, 2005; Orr & Metzger, 2005; Orr, 2005b). Similarly, research using traditional economics or sociological approaches fails to capture and uncover the levels of complexity with which governance structures for these projects must contend.

This proposal seeks to launch a multi-year, multi-disciplinary effort to better understand the mix of factors that condition the likelihood that large infrastructure development projects will face potentially fatal forms of institutional conflict or emergent political opposition. We also hope to use the investigation to identify forms of response--either proactive or reactive--by project managers that are effective in minimizing the extent or incidence of such conflict. Our proposed research draws on engineering project management, organizational and institutional theory, political science and political sociology, and transaction cost economics to provide theoretical frameworks and analysis tools to examine factors affecting the design and effectiveness of project governance systems.

Owing to the relative lack of systematic research in this area, we regard this study as exploratory in nature. That said, we see it as a critically important step toward our ultimate goal: the development of a formal model designed to predict the various engineering, institutional and political challenges the managers of a given project are likely to face. Indeed, drawing on the results of this study, we expect to construct and test such a model in a follow-up project. The value of such a model should be obvious-- reducing the number of unpleasant surprises for stakeholders and identifying parameters of governance arrangements to reduce costs and risks for project participants and host countries. To IIS, such a model can contribute to the broad goals of advancing systems of governance and human well-being.

Posted by rjorr at March 2, 2006 6:10 PM