ABSTRACT
Methods such as environmental impact assessment, multi-criteria analysis, and especially cost-benefit analysis are now commonly applied in the planning of megaprojects (e.g. Priemus et al., 2008). Still, megaprojects – i.e. ‘large-scale, complex projects delivered through (…) partnerships between public and private organisations’ (Van Marrewijk et al., 2008: 591) – regularly overrun their budgets and planned construction time, and they are confronted with socio-political dissatisfaction. A topical example from the Netherlands is the A15 MaasvlakteVaanplein project. The construction of this €2,031 million public-private partnership project started in 2011. It concerns the reconstruction of a 37 km highway corridor between the Maasvlakte port area and the city of Rotterdam (Ministerie van Infrastructuur en Milieu et al., 2013). Newspapers recently reported an estimated cost overrun of about €250 million and tense relationships between the project principal, project contractor, and project stakeholders (Verbraeken and Weissink, 2014; Houtekamer, 2015). This example shows that in implementation – which concerns the execution of a contract after project planning, i.e. infrastructure construction and/or service delivery (Jones and Noble, 2008) – sound plans and good intentions developed in megaproject planning can easily fail (cf. Pressman and Wildavsky, 1984). Therefore, it is important to evaluate project implementation, in order to learn how to improve the planning and implementation of similar projects in the future (Short and Kopp, 2005). Pressman and Wildavsky aptly said: ‘learning is the key to both implementation and evaluation. We evaluate to learn, and we learn to implement (1984: xviii).
