LIST OF PANELS

In public management and administration, there is an increasing debate over megaprojects’ policy formulation and implementation (Flyvbjerg 2017). However, the role of discourse and policy narratives in relation to megaprojects has been relatively underexplored (see e.g. Esposito, Terlizzi, and Crutzen 2020; van Wijk and Fischhendler 2017).

Megaprojects are long since considered a popular policy measure to stimulate the economy (Aschauer 1990). These are usually defined as large-scale ventures that take many years to develop and build, involve multiple public and private stakeholders and have a long-lasting impact on the economy, environment and society. Megaprojects are extremely complex, uncertain and conflictual policy fields marked by the existence of different sociotechnical imaginaries about how megaproject-related changes will contribute to public purposes, collective futures, and the common good (Cousins 2020; Hsu 2018). While the logic upon which many megaprojects are based relies on benefits associated with the provision of network services to citizens in several policy domains (e.g. transport policy, water management), numerous criticisms have been raised against them for a number of reasons, ranging from their top-down planning processes to the negative effects on local communities.

In bringing together critical management and policy studies, the aim of the panel is to explore the discursive practices which populate and inform megaprojects’ administration and management. In the literature, increasing attention is paid to narratives and how they affect the policy process and the opinion of the general public (Fischer and Forester 1993; Roe 1994; Shanahan et al. 2018). The legitimation function of narratives is strictly intertwined with the role of ideas and knowledge in shaping policies. Ideas in fact represent cognitive orderings of the material world and posit causal relations that guide policy-makers and affect the behavior of citizens towards the proposed policy path. The panel welcomes papers posing research questions relating to how discourse and narratives – embedded in different institutional contexts –  are conveyed by agents to articulate and make sense of megaprojects complexity, uncertainty, and conflictuality, advancing our understanding of actors’ competing views about how the megaproject will contribute to the economy, the environment, and society.

References

Aschauer, David Alan. 1990. “Why Is Infrastructure Important?” Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, New England Economic Review, 21–48.

Cousins, Joshua J. 2020. “Malleable Infrastructures: Crisis and the Engineering of Political Ecologies in Southern California.” Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 3 (3): 927–48. https://doi.org/10.1177/2514848619893208.

Esposito, Giovanni, Andrea Terlizzi, and Nathalie Crutzen. 2020. “Policy Narratives and Megaprojects: The Case of the Lyon-Turin High-Speed Railway.” Public Management Review, 1–25. https://doi.org/10.1080/14719037.2020.1795230.

Fischer, Frank, and John Forester, eds. 1993. The Argumentative Turn in Policy Analysis and Planning. London: Duke University Press.

Flyvbjerg, Bent, ed. 2017. The Oxford Handbook of Megaproject Management. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hsu, Jinn-Yuh. 2018. “Hsinchu Technopolis: A Sociotechnical Imaginary of Modernity in Taiwan?” Critical Sociology 44 (3): 487–501. https://doi.org/10.1177/0896920517705440.

Roe, Emery. 1994. Narrative Policy Analysis: Theory and Practice. Durham and London: Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1177/1350507698291008.

Shanahan, Elizabeth A., Michael D. Jones, Mark K. McBeth, and Claudio M. Radaelli. 2018. “The Narrative Policy Framework.” In Theories of the Policy Process, edited by Christopher M. Weible and Paul A. Sabatier. New York: Routledge.

Wijk, Josef van, and Itay Fischhendler. 2017. “The Construction of Urgency Discourse around Mega-Projects: The Israeli Case.” Policy Sciences 50 (3): 469–94. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11077-016-9262-0.

The panel builds upon critical post-positivist scholarship in public policy and management studies and it is open to different theoretical and empirical approaches. It embraces methodological pluralism, welcomes either single-case or comparative studies, and deals with any stage of the policy cycle in relation to a variety of policy sectors. In the definition of megaprojects, we include large-scale infrastructure projects (e.g., canals, airports, harbours, dykes, railways, highways, bridges) as well as events (e.g. Olympic games and other mega sports events, Expo) and public investment programs (e.g., EU funding programs). We are also interested in topics such as disaster and emergency management (including natural and environmental disasters as well as disease outbreaks such as the COVID-19 pandemic), energy transition policies, smart cities, and sustainable urban transitions.

What unites the great variety of megaprojects is the presence of the following characteristics: complexity, uncertainty, and conflictuality. Complexity derives from the fact that megaprojects require high levels of inter-organizational cooperation across geographical, cultural, institutional, and political boundaries (Scott, Levitt, and Orr 2011), and their implementation is context-sensitive and unpredictable (Geyer and Cairney 2015). Uncertainty and conflicts often arise due to the fact that – because of different sociotechnical imaginaries about the megaproject’s contribution to public purposes, collective futures, and the common good – opposing stakeholders (e.g., policy-makers and local communities) may have competing views, informed by contested information and evidence, about how a megaproject will contribute to the economy, the environment, and society (Awakul and Ogunlana 2002). The literature has also stressed the importance of institutions describing megaprojects as large-scale sociotechnical undertakings embedded in institutional frames enabling the managerial team to withstand and survive the impacts of emergent controversies with other stakeholders (Biesenthal et al. 2018).

In the context of such uncertain, complex, conflictual and institutionally-embedded policy fields, concerned actors engage in a battle over competing narratives, namely they discursively construct and mobilize sets of stories and arguments to influence – either legitimating or delegitimating – choices and decisions about the megaproject. Through argumentation, actors aim at bringing out unstated assumptions and conflicting interpretations of the facts (Majone 1989; Fischer 2017). Important questions that papers might examine include:

·       Role of agency: how do actors discursively construct competing megaprojects’ realities? how do competing policy narratives deployed by proponents and opponents of megaprojects variously co-exist, evolve, and shape decisions? How do actors use narratives to make sense of megaprojects’ complexity, uncertainty, and conflictuality?

·       Role of structure: How does the institutional context shape the way through which stakeholders’ discursive practices occur? How do controversies issuing from adversarial narratives unfold in different (supranational, national and subnational) institutional settings? What are the institutional settings that facilitate or hamper the resolution of controversies? How do institutional frameworks contribute to reduce complexity and uncertainty in megaprojects?

References

Awakul, Prapatpaow, and Stephen O. Ogunlana. 2002. “The Effect of Attitudinal Differences on Interface Conflicts in Large Scale Construction Projects: A Case Study.” Construction Management and Economics 20 (4): 365–77. https://doi.org/10.1080/01446190210133456.

Biesenthal, Christopher, Stewart Clegg, Ashwin Mahalingam, and Shankar Sankaran. 2018. “Applying Institutional Theories to Managing Megaprojects.” International Journal of Project Management 36 (1): 43–54. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijproman.2017.06.006.

Fischer, Frank. 2017. “In Pursuit of Usable Knowledge: Critical Policy Analysis and the Argumentative Turn.” In Handbook of Critical Policy Studies, edited by Frank Fischer, Douglas Torgerson, Anna Durnová, and Michael Orsini. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.

Geyer, Robert, and Paul Cairney, eds. 2015. Handbook on Complexity and Public Policy. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.

Majone, Giandomenico. 1989. Evidence, Argument, and Persuasion in the Policy Process. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Scott, W. Richard, Raymond E. Levitt, and Ryan J. Orr, eds. 2011. Global Projects: Institutional and Political Challenges. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.