Many projects experience cost overruns and fail to meet the expectations of users and funding parties. Numerous studies have documented projects that have failed, but there is less advice on what can be done to improve their performance. This chapter builds on research carried out by the Concept Research Programme in Norway, which for more than 20 years has been tasked by the Ministry of Finance to research large government projects. The authors offer advice on how project owners can increase the likelihood of project success. The advice includes the importance of a project governance regime, external review of estimates, and well-aligned incentives. The authors argue that the institutional context through which projects are delivered may have consequences for the ability of individuals and organisations to knowingly or unconsciously bias estimates. They also recommend follow-up activities after project completion, such as active ownership to realise benefits and systematic ex-post evaluation to improve accountability and learning.

This chapter addresses the impact of governance on project behavior from an intra-organizational and an inter-organizational perspective. It starts by introducing governance fundamentals, like principles, approaches, standards, and paradigms, and subsequently describes the implications of these fundamentals for project behavior. Four behavior types are identified based on projects’ teleological, deontological, introvert, and extravert behavior. The inter-organizational view introduces a three-layered model for the governance of inter-organizational networks for large and megaprojects. This addresses multi-layer governance at the levels of a) network governance (i.e., for a single project), b) governance of networks (i.e., for the network of networks for several projects of a firm), and c) metagovernance (i.e., the investor’s ground rules for governance). The reader benefits from the discussion on the impact of these layers on project behavior, from understanding the impact of governance complexity on project behavior, and the practical examples given throughout the text.

This chapter concludes and provides recommendations for the better integration of the judicial and private mechanisms discussed in previous chapters so that they deliver fairer, clearer, more predictable and UNDRIP-compliant outcomes for indigenous communities. National laws must recognise the special vulnerability of land-connected people to development projects and impose a moratorium on land disturbance until a developer has undertaken a preventative conflict assessment. That assessment must take no longer than state divestment of land and must necessitate a mediation process which interfaces with the layers of race, ethnicity, legacy and postcolonial histories that can relate to land. This chapter considers what this process entails (including the requirement for the legal ability of communities to say no at this point) and methods for dealing with the cost and independence of such a process (blind trusts). Aspects of this assessment could, through a code of practice, then feed into project governance much further upstream and tighten existing documentation at the specific points at which indigenous vulnerability to dispossession is high, as detailed. Other suggestions on institutional culture are made.