Launched in 2012, and now in its 6th edition, the megaprojects workshop is an international
event that brings together leading scholars and practitioners to share and discuss new ideas that
can further our understanding of megaprojects as a complex form of organizing to develop capital-intensive
infrastructure and achieve collective goals.
As the backbone of modern society, infrastructure is a basic enabler of socioeconomic development.
But as Africa´s population grows rapidly, the gap between infrastructure supply and demand is widening
worryingly. Building on an extensive collection of empirical studies about global efforts to build Africa´s
infrastructure, the book advances the argument that organizations tackling this grand societal chalenge face
a duality - institutional building and capital allocation are both desirable objectives, but it is hard to
design organizations to pursue both because the underlying atributes are incompatible.
In this paper Nuno Gil draws on organisation design literature to call for research on the interdependency
between designing systems to build capital-intensive public goods (basic infrastructure) and navigating institutional
voids. Nuno grounds this call on a duality rooted in the two main concomitant efforts of our time to tackle this
challenge: the inclusive, market-oriented forms of organising as favoured by western development agencies; and the
centralised, state-led forms of organising espoused by Chinese agencies.
In this new paper in Research Policy, using data from four capital-intensive infrastructure development projects in the UK
(Crossrail, London 2012, Heathrow T2, and High-Speed 2), Nuno Gil and Jeff Pinto advance the main arguments that megaproject
organizations in the planning stage have a polycentric architecture.
