Facilitating effective external stakeholder involvement in the pre-design phase of civil engineering infrastructure projects

Due to the lack of agreement on the problems they are meant to address, civil engineering infrastructure projects often become subject to controversy once they enter the public arena. Therefore, a case study research to examine the extent of external stakeholder involvement in the pre-design phase of two civil engineering infrastructure projects from the UK was conducted. The findings revealed that external stakeholders are having limited (if any) input into key aspects of the project defined during the pre-design phase – the earliest phase of the project life cycle. It was found that due to the lack of an overarching approach for project identification, we often see lobby groups mobilising support for a project (solution) that may constitute opportunities to the developers, but neither solve the external stakeholders’ problems nor meet their expectations. This results in misalignment of the project purpose and external stakeholder expectations, thereby leading to lack of buy-in from external stakeholders which in turn can limit project success. Consequently, a novel two-stage project identification process for identifying civil engineering infrastructure projects was developed. The proposal brings together infrastructure developers and external stakeholders at an early stage of the project life cycle to first identify problems, and second to generate solutions, assess them and then choose a preferred solution to be included in the feasibility stage. To ensure that the proposal is applicable, it was validated through interviews with project managers, stakeholder managers, project stakeholder organisations and local authorities from the UK. The novelty of the two-stage process is in which project identification, problem solving and stakeholder involvement processes have been synthesised and integrated to fulfil the need for addressing the limited external stakeholder involvement in project identification while being theoretically rigorous.