Fading Glory? Decision-Making around the Project — How and Why ‘Glory’ Projects Fail

Abstract

In this chapter we wish to focus on the practice of governing relationships, collaboration and decision-making around the project, where ‘project’ is understood as a label for a complex process through which participants jointly accomplish a sophisticated cooperative task, declared or approved as worthwhile, or strategically important. We are primarily concerned with large-scale multi-party projects which are linked to significant investment decisions, as these are inevitably in the public eye and exposed to general scrutiny (Trapenberg-Frick, 2008). These projects are surrounded by an aura of glory through the rhetoric used to describe them — a narrated promise of extreme prosperity.¹ They are often born out of vanity or human ambition (Rehn, 2006), and associated with engineering, scientific or managerial achievements. Promised, declared and expected benefits of these projects relate to a large number of people and their livelihoods, so it is hard to question them (Trapenberg-Frick, 2008), but their work processes and development (neither always visible nor reported) often adversely impact on an equally large number of people and their livelihoods. They are costly — and often under-estimated (Flyvbjerg, Bruzelius and Rothengatter, 2003), and controversial socially, environmentally or politically. Moreover, the aura of glory is likely to create and perpetuate a specific decision-making rationality with ‘a political dimension that can capture the imagination of political leaders and the public’ (Trapenberg-Frick, 2008, pp. 242–3).