Integrating Risk and Stakeholder Management in Complex Mega-projects: A Multilayer Network Analysis Approach

The complexity of megaprojects requires methodological methods able to analyze the interaction between multiple systems in an integrated way rather than analyzing isolated systems (e.g., either stakeholders or risks). However, although project management has devoted significant efforts to employing classical unidimensional networks to analyze either stakeholders or risks in an isolated way, there is lacking multidimensional analyses that integrate both perspectives to unravel complexity. By integrating the risks and the economic transaction between stakeholders in a multilayer network analysis, this study aims to constitute the first effort to develop multilayer analysis to unravel behaviors that are hidden in unidimensional analysis. Using a 220 million € Italian education megaproject, this study exposes the risk allocation patterns and potential suboptimal risk allocation patterns resulting in stakeholders' underperformance and project issues. The analysis exposed that public stakeholders with low interdependence demonstrated a good performance due to their active role in the monetary transfers but low-risk exposition, which highlights risk transfer to the private sector. Complementary, the analysis of the betweenness and eigenvector centrality in the aggregated multilayer network demonstrates that when is significantly lower than these metrics in the unidimensional money flow network, there is a potential suboptimal risk allocation that may result in underperformance of these stakeholders.