Integrating Sustainability Into Major Projects. Wayne McPhee

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Figure 2.1 Sustainability strategies for different project structures.

2.4 Key Players

This section explores what we see as three categories of key players in a major project, and how they can interact throughout the project life to establish a framework for understanding some of the challenges and opportunities to integration of sustainability into projects. The key players involved in major projects can be divided into three broad categories: the organization, the government, and the local community.

      The organization includes any group involved in the delivery of a project, including the owner organization, project delivery team, consultants, suppliers, contractors, and employees. Government includes the broad range of government departments such as economic development, taxation, regulatory approval, health, environment, and education. And the community includes the people that live in the area surrounding or near the project or are affected by the project's downstream impacts or transportation routes.

Traditionally, these three key players interacted in a basic linear structure (see Figure 2.2) where the organization engaged with the government over regulatory approvals and taxation, and the government and the community engaged through elections (if the project was located in a democracy), law enforcement, social services, and taxation. The organization and the community had some engagement (typically around local employment) but, overall, they had only limited formal engagement with each other.

Over time, as local communities have gained more understanding of project development and more influence (i.e. through social media), the relationship between the three players has evolved into a more complex structure where the organization, the government, and the community are all interacting as active players with each other, as illustrated in Figure 2.3. Obviously, this is still a gross oversimplification of the situation but understanding project development as a three-player model allows us to gain useful insights into the variety of interactions and the potential for conflict faced by each of the players.

      At the core of this understanding is that organizations now require both official approvals and permits from the government and informal permission from the community to develop and operate the project. In the traditional linear model, an organization would seek permits from the government and then rely on the government to ensure that the local community does not prevent the project from being developed. In the new model, an organization still must engage with the government to get the required official permits, but now must also engage with the local community to gain and maintain community support. Too many organizations still rely on government approvals alone, and then are forced to delay project construction due to legal challenges or protests from an unsupportive local community.

This can be most challenging when the organization developing the project is led by a government entity where there may be a sense that they do not need to engage local communities and earn their support, since they are already representatives of the public. In these cases, the organization needs to understand the difference between the general public that the government represents (i.e. national or regional) and the local communities that are directly experiencing project impacts.

Figure 2.2 Traditional organization, government, and community relationship.

Figure 2.3 Modern organization, government, and community relationship.

      The proposed approach, where the project organization embraces the three-player model and ensures that the community has input into the project, can help ensure that the local community has a seat at the negotiating table. In this model, the community benefits from the project and maintains a strong position of influence with both the organization and the government. Actively bringing the local community into the project development process may seem counterintuitive but local engagement can reduce project costs, provide a broader set of options for developing and operating the project facility, and reduce overall project risk.

2.5 Managing Time and Space

      One of the key challenges with understanding how other groups and people will respond to your project is to understand their perception of the project in space (location) and time. Projects are typically short-term in duration (i.e. 3 to 10 years), which is usually at odds with sustainability goals that can be multigenerational. The brief time frame can create a very transactional, short-term approach to project delivery as opposed to a cooperative, longer-term approach that focuses on the full life–cycle impact of project development, operations and maintenance, and eventual decommissioning.

Project teams need to understand that they have a very different set of objectives than governments and local communities (see Table 2.1). To create better projects, teams need to expand their traditional short-term thinking to look beyond capital cost and construction schedule to consider long-term impacts on the environment and the local community, as well as the long-term relationships with project stakeholders.

Table 2.1 Time and space for players Involved in major projects.

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