Strategies for managing communities through the lifecycle of large-scale transport infrastructure

Johan Ninan, Ashwin Mahalingam and Stewart Clegg

Chapter 2 in The Elgar Companion to Transport Infrastructure Projects, 2026, pp 8-23 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: Countries across the globe plan massive investments in transportation infrastructure projects to achieve development and economic goals rapidly. However, these projects are plagued by failures and inefficiencies, often due to the project's inability to handle external stakeholders such as the project community. Project communities, as the end users of the project, are likely to be the most inconvenienced by the project; moreover, they hold significant potential to stop or hinder a project through community resistance or political mobilization. In this context, we seek to understand how a metro rail transport infrastructure project in India managed its project community through overt and covert strategies, using an in-depth case study focusing on dimensions and circuits of power. The research draws on data from 30 semi-structured interviews with the project team and five years of social media data comprising 640 tweets. A grounded theory method is used to find the overt and covert strategies and the relationship between them. The results show a reciprocal relationship between the less visible covert strategies and the more visible overt strategies. The covert strategies rely on adaptations made for the community as part of the covert strategies, while the overt strategies depend on the changed preferences of the project community as part of the overt strategies. The findings contribute both to the theory and practice of managing project communities in large-scale transportation infrastructure projects.

Keywords: Transportation infrastructure; Project community; Strategies; Organizational power theory (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
ISBN: 9781800374874
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