Understanding community protest from a project management perspective: A relationship-based approach

Communities negatively affected by construction projects are becoming increasingly empowered, organised and willing to engage in protest. The importance of communities as project stakeholders is widely recognized in the project management literature, but there is little empirical research to help project managers understand how to effectively engage with communities to prevent protests developing and escalating. Contributing to the emerging 'Relationship Approach' in project management theory which focusses on communities as legitimate stakeholders in projects, this paper draws on theories of collective identity and social capital to present an ethnographic analysis of community action against a large-scale and highly controversial construction project in Australia. The results show that dealing with community protest is a complex and dynamic challenge for project managers due to the anarchic and self-organising properties of community-based protest groups. It is concluded that effective community engagement strategies require project managers to adopt trust-building strategies early in projects and an intimate understanding of community concerns and social structures.