External Stakeholder Management in Megaprojects – A Framework of Strategies and Power in Practice

Infrastructure megaprojects, due to their colossal nature, can cause inconvenience to multiple external stakeholders such as stakeholders in lands, existing services and project communities. These stakeholders are difficult to manage as they interact with the project across permeable boundaries, are not accountable to the requirements of a Detailed Project Report (DPR) and cannot be governed with contractual instruments or conformance to standards as in the case of internal stakeholders. Hence the project team resorts to strategies to manage these stakeholders. Even though there are records of the use of different strategies in the literature, a framework to explain how these strategies work to manage external stakeholders is missing. We use the organizational power theories of the dimensions of power framework and the circuits of power theory to understand how strategy and power interact in the process of managing external stakeholders. Using the case study of a metro rail project in India, we highlight persuading, framing and hegemonizing strategies along with the relationship between these strategies. The framework explains that covert powerbased framing and hegemonizing strategies dictate the visible overt power-based persuading strategies employed to manage external stakeholders