Building Legitimacy in Purpose-Driven Infrastructure Projects

Authored by: Mustafa Selçuk Çıdık, Mary Lawhon, Mathews J. Wakhungu, Oscar Cruz Navarro and James Kirika

Infrastructure projects are increasingly shaped by broader aims such as sustainability, equity and public value, alongside technical delivery. This creates contested environments, where stakeholders disagree over priorities and trade-offs. A project can be delivered on time, on budget and fully compliant, yet still be resisted or rejected if it isn't seen as legitimate. Drawing on interviews with project managers in the UK and Kenya, this research explores how they build legitimacy for their decisions in these settings. It identifies three recurring moments: grounding judgement, navigating context and relationships and communicating decisions, showing how legitimacy is built and sustained throughout a project's life.

How to cite this research
Çıdık, M. S., Lawhon, M., Wakhungu, M. J., Cruz Navarro, O. and Kirika, J. (2026) Building Legitimacy in Purpose-Driven Infrastructure Projects. Association for Project Management. https://doi.org/10.61175/A7K3M9Q2

Why is this research relevant?

Project managers are increasingly asked to deliver more than technical outputs, they are expected to advance sustainability, equity and public value while managing conflicting stakeholder demands. Yet existing research has largely treated legitimacy as an organisational or project-level concern, leaving how project managers themselves experience and navigate these tensions in everyday practice relatively unexplored. This report addresses that gap, giving practitioners and organisations a language for challenges that are widely experienced but rarely named, and offering APM a clearer basis for supporting professional development in this area.

Who should read this report? 

• Project managers and practitioners working on infrastructure projects with explicit social, environmental or public value aims
• Sponsors and clients responsible for setting direction across project delivery
• Project-based organisations designing governance systems
• Professional bodies and CPD providers shaping project management training
• Researchers and academics working in project studies, particularly on legitimacy, power and leadership
• Policymakers and public sector commissioners overseeing purpose-driven infrastructure delivery in the UK and Kenya

How was this research undertaken? 

The study used an interpretive qualitative design, based on 17 semi-structured interviews with project managers and closely related professionals. Participants were selected through purposive and convenience sampling, targeting practitioners with experience of infrastructure projects carrying explicit societal aims. Data was analysed using thematic analysis, following an iterative and reflexive process of coding. This led to the identification of three recurring analytical moments, which were then used to revisit and structure the full dataset. The UK and Kenya were treated as contrasting, not comparative contexts.

What did we discover? 

• Grounding judgement: project managers already shape decisions before they become visible, by drawing on personal grounds such as experience and values, and social grounds such as professional norms and political pressures.
• Navigating: purpose is actively worked on through formal structures and relationships, bounded by time, staff turnover and institutional constraints.
• Communicating: legitimacy depends on framing, storytelling, quantification and transparency.
• Power operates subtly across all three moments, and leadership and governance are better understood as ongoing, negotiated work rather than fixed systems.

Key recommendations 

• Project managers should recognise legitimacy work as core to the role and develop reflexive awareness of how judgements are grounded, navigated and communicated. 
• Organisations and sponsors should avoid excessive reliance on procedures, make room for professional discretion within governance systems and back project managers when trade-offs generate resistance.
• Professional development should build the three-moment framework of grounding, navigating and communicating into training, mentoring and CPD to give practitioners a structured way to develop these skills rather than leaving them to be picked up late and informally.