Mega infrastructure project affordance: A new perspective to improve stakeholder management and project sustainability

Mega infrastructure projects (MIPs) play crucial roles in promoting social development, regional growth, and disaster and crisis resilience. These complex projects frequently face challenges in stakeholder management, which might be a risk for their sustainability. Hence, this paper proposes affordance theory as a new theoretical framework, particularly on the basis of understanding and managing MIPs. This paper aims to achieve three main objectives: 1) conceptualizing MIP affordance, 2) documenting the influence of MIP affordance on stakeholder management and project sustainability, and 3) developing strategies for managing MIP affordance. It applies critical realism to conceptualize MIP affordance and its mechanism, and employs the expectation-confirmation theory to identify critical determinants for managing MIP affordance. The paper thus provides new knowledge and insights into the management of MIP stakeholders concerning project sustainability.