Social network analysis of stakeholder governance landscapes in infrastructure mega projects: a case of the Delhi–Mumbai Industrial Corridor project

Infrastructure mega projects are characterized by a large number of stakeholders, their complexity and many interrelated components, interfaces, and diverse stakeholder objectives. The issue of megaproject stakeholder management has gained considerable interest in recent decades due to their consistent history of underperformance. Social network analysis is a potent tool to analyze and explore stakeholder network formations of megaprojects. The present study has explored the stakeholder governance landscape of the Delhi Mumbai Industrial Corridor megaproject using interpretive policy analysis and social network analysis and captured various network level aspects namely connectedness and power structure, and assessed the actor level attributes like authority, coordination ability, power and information accessibility of various key stakeholders. The study is exploratory in nature and utilizes publicly available data and grey literature to explore various megaproject coordination issues through network theory. The preliminary findings suggest that megaprojects of the scale of industrial/economic corridors tend to show low network density. Density is observed to be equivalent to coordination complexity in megaproject stakeholder networks. The focal organizations namely the nodal agencies or the project specific special purpose vehicles (SPV) play an important role in overall governance efficacy of well-connected stakeholder landscapes. From the network perspective, eigenvector centrality is a better representative of a focal organization's coordination effectiveness in regional subnetworks where the central SPVs or nodal agencies are not considered. For overall networks, closeness centrality was observed to be a better predictor of ease of information retrieval. Degree centrality is observed to be analogous to power of the focal organization. Finally, it was observed that states like Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh show lower information asymmetry in stakeholder governance due to the high focal organization centralities and high overall network density. The paper emphasizes on the potential of applying a novel and robust analytical tool like Social Network Analysis in the context of megaproject stakeholder management and paves way for future researchers to conduct similar studies in different geographic and socio-political contexts.