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

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).