P38 Public Project Governance in the Polycrisis

Panel Chairs

Corresponding and review group chair

• Vedran Zerjav, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). vedran.zerjav@ntnu.no

Co-Chairs

• Homa Molavi, University of Greenwich.
• Giovanni Esposito, Université libre de Bruxelles.
• Pierre-André Hudon, Université Laval, FSA ULaval.
• Kamal Qazi, University of Manchester.
• Morteza Yazdani, European University of Madrid

Panel Topic Description

Public projects sit at a distinctive analytical interface. They are policy instruments — vehicles through which governments realise commitments in infrastructure, health, defence, digital transformation and climate transition — and policy objects that emerge, evolve and are assessed across the entire policy cycle, spanning both its upstream phases (agenda-setting, formulation and adoption) and downstream phases (implementation and evaluation). They are also organisational undertakings with their own governance logics, temporalities, professional communities and knowledge practices. And they are operational systems: public administrations increasingly rely on projects to deliver services, implement reforms and maintain critical functions, and these projects often involve complex digital infrastructures, sensitive data, multiple stakeholders and dependencies across organisational boundaries.

The research communities studying them have developed largely in parallel, with limited sustained dialogue. Public administration and public policy scholarship has examined policy processes, institutional design, multi-level coordination and democratic accountability, often focused on the political-institutional layer that commissions, funds and legitimates projects. Within these accounts the project as an organisational form frequently disappears from view — treated as a black box that either delivers or fails to deliver on policy intent. Project studies scholarship, in turn, has developed rich accounts of project organising, front-end governance, capabilities and inter-organisational relationships. Within these accounts the political-institutional context in which public projects are commissioned and evaluated is often treated as scenery rather than as a constitutive element of the governance object itself. A third body of work, on digital government, risk governance and organisational resilience, has addressed the security of public systems, but rarely through the lens of how projects are governed.

This panel invites papers that bridge these traditions around a common object: the governance of public projects, followed from political priority through to operational continuity. That arc has acquired particular urgency. As artificial intelligence reshapes the cybersecurity landscape, public sector projects face new forms of vulnerability, including AI-enabled cyber threats, evolving attack strategies and difficulties in managing uncertainty. Projects are commissioned under pressure, appraised against contested and shifting rationales, and implemented in environments characterised by interconnected crises and growing security risks. Safety and security are therefore not a technical annex to delivery. They are produced, or eroded, through governance choices made throughout the project lifecycle: how problems are framed and options appraised, how risk and responsibility are allocated across organisational boundaries, how capability is retained in public client organisations, and how decisions are made under uncertainty.

We welcome theoretical, empirical, comparative and practice-oriented contributions that examine public projects as objects requiring both policy-implementation and project-studies lenses, and that treat security, resilience and digital transformation as governance and organisational questions rather than purely technical ones. We are open to a wide range of theoretical framings and encourage papers that develop novel conceptual work at this interface as well as those that apply established perspectives from either tradition to phenomena the other has under-theorised. Contributions are welcome from public administration, public management, public policy, digital government, cybersecurity governance, project management and organisational studies, and may examine different types of public projects, including major infrastructure, digital service delivery, critical infrastructure, public sector modernisation initiatives and cross-organisational programmes.

The panel welcomes contributions addressing questions such as:

• How are political priorities translated into major public projects, and why do some societal problems become projects while others do not?
• How do governance arrangements across the politics–policy–project continuum shape the outcomes public projects deliver to citizens and institutions?
• How do public administrations manage cybersecurity and other emerging risks within operational projects?
• How are security and resilience considerations integrated into project planning, implementation and delivery?
• What organisational capabilities enable public sector projects to remain resilient during disruption?
• How do public managers and project leaders make decisions under uncertainty, including uncertainty created by AI-driven risks?
• What governance arrangements support collaboration between public organisations and external partners in delivering and protecting projects?
• How do institutional structures, regulations and organisational cultures influence governance and security practices?
• What is learned from project failure, and how does that learning feed back into policy?

We are equally interested in front-end governance and appraisal; how competing actors attach different values to major public investments; realisation and benefits management; the democratic legitimacy of major public investments; capability and learning in public client organisations; comparative and cross-country governance patterns; sustainability integration into decision processes; and the digital transformation of governance regimes.

Methodologically, we welcome a broad range of approaches: comparative case studies across projects and countries; single-project ethnographies; longitudinal designs tracing governance decisions and their consequences; mixed-methods studies combining quantitative performance data with qualitative institutional analysis; qualitative comparative analysis of governance configurations; documentary and discourse analysis; and practice-oriented research co-produced with government and industry partners.

By convening scholars from public administration, public policy, digital government and project studies traditions, the panel aims to build shared analytical vocabulary and to identify productive lines of collaborative research that can be developed further beyond the conference.

Relevance to the Conference Theme

This panel addresses the IRSPM 2027 theme, “Polycrisis, Wicked Problems and Grand Challenges: Public Administrations in Search of Safety and Security”, from two directions at once: how political and policy priorities become public projects in the first place, and how public organisations maintain operational capacity in those projects in the face of evolving risks.

Public projects have grown in significance as instruments of contemporary public policy. Climate transition, digital transformation, defence renewal, health infrastructure and urban development are increasingly delivered through major project investments. At the same time, disruptions to operational projects can affect service delivery, organisational performance and public trust. Administrations in search of safety and security are, in practice, administrations that must commission, govern and protect the projects through which safety and security are produced.

Yet public management scholarship has, with important exceptions, remained more focused on policy design and less on the governance of implementation through project-based organising, while project studies has developed sophisticated accounts of project organising largely outside the disciplinary conversation on public administration. Protecting public sector projects, meanwhile, requires more than technical solutions; it involves managerial capabilities, governance arrangements, coordination mechanisms and organisational learning, all of which are public management concerns.

This panel contributes to public management scholarship in three specific ways.

First, it opens sustained conversation between research communities that have much to offer each other. Public management gains renewed engagement with the concrete organisational forms through which policy is implemented; project studies gains renewed engagement with the political-institutional contexts that shape project governance; and both gain engagement with research on risk governance, digital government, crisis management and public sector innovation that increasingly defines the conditions in which public organisations operate.

Second, it foregrounds the governance of public projects as a distinct object of study rather than treating projects as either policy objects (viewed from above) or organisational artefacts (viewed from within). This intermediate framing invites new theoretical work at an interface both communities have under-theorised, and the panel extends it downstream to the operational layer, where continuity, security and resilience are at stake and where obligations to citizens are most directly tested.

Third, it strengthens the empirical and methodological base for studying public investments — a domain where the stakes for citizens are large, where implementation failures are common and consequential, and where scholarly understanding remains fragmented across disciplinary traditions. By convening research that runs from policy formulation through to operational security, the panel supports the development of public management as a field engaged with the practical challenges of getting major public investments commissioned, delivered and kept running well.