Acknowledging the role of corruption in large infrastructure projects

Corruption is a global nuisance that increases costs and delays of large infrastructure projects and impedes their completion, decreasing benefits and limiting positive social and economic impacts. The growing body of work on corruption in the project management field provides a valuable contribution, but further work is needed to develop a more nuanced understanding. This paper has two key aims. The first aim is to build a preliminary framework for understanding and analysing the stakeholder incentives (both the personal and the organizational) within large infrastructure projects, which explicitly recognizes the role of endemic and normalized corruption. This paper uses stakeholder analysis as a starting point and starts building a new approach that includes an understanding of corrupt or seemingly perverse behaviours on the part of key stakeholders in low-resource settings across project lifecycle. The second aim is to present a research design to explicate how to manage infrastructure development under corrupted conditions. The proposed research design adopts a systematic review approach that focuses on evidence-informed management knowledge. In so doing, it applies a design-oriented research synthesis using CIMO-logic with the purpose of informing academia and practice about how interventions (I) work in different contexts and context-specific problems (C), providing understanding of the mechanisms (M) through which certain outcomes (O) emerge.