What you Should Know about Megaprojects and Why: An Overview
By Bent Flyvbjerg. 2014
1,659 citations recorded by the source corpus.
This paper takes stock of megaproject management, an emerging and hugely costly field of study, by first answering the question of how large megaprojects are by measuring them in the units of mega, giga, and tera, and concluding with how we are presently entering a new “tera era” of trillion-dollar projects. Second, total global megaproject spending is assessed, at US$6 to US$9 trillion annually, or 8% of the total global gross domestic product (GDP), which denotes the biggest investment boom in human history. Third, four “sublimes”—political, technological, economic, and aesthetic—are identified and used to explain the increased size and frequency of megaprojects. Fourth, the “iron law of megaprojects” is laid out and documented: Over budget, over time, over and over again. Moreover, the “break–fix model” of megaproject management is introduced as an explanation of the iron law. Fifth, Albert O. Hirschman's theory of the “Hiding Hand” is revisited and critiqued as unfounded and corrupting for megaproject thinking in both the academy and policy. Sixth, it is shown how megaprojects are systematically subject to “survival of the unfittest,” which explains why the worst projects get built rather than the best. Finally, it is argued that the conventional way of managing megaprojects has reached a “tension point,” in which tradition is being challenged and reform is emerging.
Subfields: Management Science and Operations Research
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/44d456e63809c4eaf478525d58940bdf4a9c1ada
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In Management Science and Operations Research
- Yehua Dennis Wei
- Bent Flyvbjerg
- Bert van Wee
- T. Harland
- Adrijana Biba Starman
- Mario Pansera
- Bjarne Steffen
- R. Wood
Citations in the corpus
- Top Ten Behavioral Biases in Project Management: An Overview (2021, background): “For megaproject management, strategic misrepresentation may be expected to be the dominant bias (Flyvbjerg, 2014).”
- Social responsibility of major infrastructure projects in China (2015, background): “It is noteworthy that complexity and sustainability are proposed as important issues on infrastructure management (Bosch-Rekveldt et al., 2011; Davies andHobday, 2005; Flyvbjerg, 2014; Levitt, 2007).”
- Zone Fever, Project Fever: Development Policy, Economic Transition, and Urban Expansion in China (2015, background): “Flyvbjerg (2014) uses technological, political, economic, and aesthetic sublimes to explain what drove of the global megaproject boom.”