Project Management Journal Vol. 51(1) 24 –37 © 2020 Project Management Institute, Inc. Article reuse guidelines: sagepub. com/ journals- permissionsDOI: 10.1177/8756972819878346 journals. sagepub. ...

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Project Management Journal Vol. 51(1) 24 –37 © 2020 Project Management Institute, Inc. Article reuse guidelines: sagepub. com/ journals- permissionsDOI: 10.1177/8756972819878346 journals. sagepub. com/ home/ pmx
Article
The Practice of Public Engagement
on Projects: From Managing External
Stakeholders to Facilitating
Active Contributors
Vivien Chow 1and Roine Leiringer 2
Abstract
The premise of public engagement is to invite community members into the project’s decision-making processes. In project
management research, public engagement is usually addressed under the umbrella of stakeholder management, which, although a
useful perspective to adopt, has its limitations. In this article, a processual view is advocated, which treats public engagement as
dynamic and emergent. Drawing on ethnographic data, we demonstrate how observing public engagement “in the making” helps
explain the politics behind engagement efforts. This allows for conclusions to be drawn about the practice of engagement that
reflects the evolving needs of stakeholders and how best to manage them.
Keywords
public engagement, power relations, ethnography, stakeholder management, Hong Kong
Introduction
In line with the ideals of “inclusive governance” (see Lane,
2005), public sector clients in many countries allow members
of the public, who may be affected by their projects, the oppor-
tunity to affect the project outcomes. To do so, public engage-
ment mechanisms are set in place to promote information flow
between parties with the aim of facilitating collaborative deci-
sion making (Innes & Booher, 2004) that incorporates legiti-
mate decisions into the project. Such actions take on many
forms across the world, and the extent to which engagement
activities are mandatory varies across jurisdictions. In general,
though, public engagement involves three chronologically dis-
tinct elements: “public communication,” “public consultation,”
and “public participation” (Rowe & Frewer, 2005). These ele-
ments are distinct in that the public needs to have the project
information communicated to them, and be consulted on the
relevant details, before they will be able to participate in the
decision-making process.Within the project management literature, public engage-
ment is often subsumed under the broader umbrella of stake-
holder management (e.g., Heravi, Coffey, & Trigunarsyah,
2015; Johansen, Eik-Andresen, & Ekambaram, 2014). With
their foundation in resource-based theory, traditional stake-
holder management approaches typically judge stakeholders
based on their actual and potential influences on a project and
allocate resources to manage them accordingly. In the associated literature, it is frequently argued that stakeholder
management directly influences the success or failure of a
project (Nguyen, Chilese, & Rameezdeen, 2018; Turner &
Zolin, 2012), and stakeholder engagement is often justified
by how it may affect project outcomes (Di Maddaloni & Davis,
2