Who Connects What We Learn from Communities to the Decisions That Shape a Project?
Why earning local legitimacy and support requires project integration, organisational capability, and Board accountability.
Most major infrastructure projects can answer some basic organisational questions quite easily.
Who is responsible for engineering?
Who owns the financial model?
Who leads planning, consenting, and legal compliance?
Who is responsible for community engagement?
Who is accountable for the overall project?
And, ultimately, who makes the major investment decisions?
The responsibilities may be distributed across different teams, but the functions are usually clear.
So perhaps the question in the title has an obvious answer.
Surely connecting what a project learns from communities to the decisions that shape it is part of what a good Project Director – or equivalent accountable project lead – should do.
We think that is substantially right.
The Project Director should be responsible for the whole project proposition. They should be asking whether the right evidence is available, whether the right people are involved, whether important trade-offs have been surfaced, and whether a consequential decision is about to close before something material has properly been considered.
A Project Manager may coordinate much of that work day to day. Specialist functions provide the evidence and expertise. Titles and structures vary between organisations.
The harder question is:
Does the organisation give its Project Director the capability, information, processes, mandate, and accountability needed to integrate what matters in the shared place with the same seriousness as technical, financial, and legal requirements?
And does that responsibility ultimately reach executive and Board-level governance?
That takes us somewhere more interesting.
Responsibility is not the same as capability
Imagine an offshore wind project narrowing down a cable corridor.
Engineering has assessed the options. Environmental work is progressing. Costs and programme implications are becoming clearer. A preferred corridor is emerging, and the project is moving towards a decision.
Meanwhile, engagement with fishers, coastal communities, or others who know and use the area reveals something material.
Perhaps seasonal fishing patterns are different from those assumed in the project data. Perhaps a route creates a problem that is not obvious from a chart. Perhaps local knowledge identifies an alternative or a timing issue that has not previously been considered.
The engagement team may have done its job very well.
The engineering team may also have done its job very well.
And the Project Director may ultimately be accountable for the proponent’s decision.
But does the project have a reliable pathway through which what has just been learned reaches that decision while meaningful alternatives are still open?
Who recognises that the issue is material?
Who identifies the decision capable of addressing it?
Who knows when that decision is going to close?
Who brings the relevant people and evidence together?
Who distinguishes a genuine constraint from an assumption or preferred option?
And, if the trade-off cannot be resolved within the project team, where does it go?
The weakness may not be that nobody is responsible.
It may be that responsibility exists without an equivalent organisational capability behind it.
Engagement is essential – but it cannot carry this alone
In our earlier article, When engagement cannot reach the consequential decision, we explored the gap between hearing something important and having a credible route through which it can influence the project.
The central idea was simple:
A project can become good at hearing and reporting without becoming good at learning and changing.
Good engagement is essential.
It is where relationships are built, assumptions are challenged, local knowledge becomes visible, impacts are understood, and possibilities for better outcomes emerge.
But the engagement team usually does not own the array layout, cable corridor, investment case, land strategy, procurement decision, construction methodology, or programme.
So what is learned has to enter a wider project-development system.
That makes this not only an engagement question, but also a project integration and governance question.
The Fourth Pillar changes the management question
Our wider Fourth Pillar work starts from a straightforward proposition.
Projects developed in shared space need to work across four interdependent foundations: technical feasibility, financial viability, legal and regulatory security, and sufficient local legitimacy and support.
In From Three Pillars to Four, we argued that this fourth foundation belongs within project and executive governance precisely because it can materially affect whether projects succeed and because engagement teams cannot build it alone.
The first three pillars already have mature organisational machinery behind them.
They have specialist disciplines, professional standards, risk processes, stage gates, executive oversight, investment criteria, assurance, and established routes into senior decision-making.
There is also extensive good practice around the fourth. Community engagement, Social Performance, participatory planning, environmental and social assessment, mediation, community benefits, local ownership, stakeholder relations, and other disciplines all contribute.
The question is not whether this expertise exists.
It is whether local legitimacy and support are represented within project development with comparable organisational seriousness.
This is what we mean by Fourth Pillar Capability:
Fourth Pillar Capability is the organisational capability to understand what matters in a shared place, connect that knowledge to consequential project decisions, and reconcile it with technical, financial, and legal requirements – so that a project can earn and sustain local legitimacy and support.
Four questions expose whether the connection exists
Take one material concern, aspiration, right, piece of local knowledge, or opportunity and follow it through the project.
Ask four questions:
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Materiality – What matters here, to whom, and why?
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Decision leverage – Which decision could materially address it?
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Authority – Who legitimately controls that decision, and whose influence over it should be recognised?
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Openness – When, and to what extent, is that decision still genuinely open to influence?
These four questions do not determine the decision.
They show whether the material issue has been connected to the right decision, with the right people involved, while there is still meaningful room to act.
And Authority matters particularly.
Not every consequential decision belongs to the project proponent.
A government may determine whether offshore wind should be developed and under what policy framework. A regulator or planning authority may own a statutory determination. Indigenous governments and rights-holders may hold distinct rights and decision-making authority. A landowner may control access. A community organisation may control community-owned assets or decide whether to enter a partnership.
Other matters may require agreement, consent, negotiation, or collaborative design.
Fourth Pillar Capability is therefore not about making every decision shared.
It is about making decision ownership, legitimate influence, and the pathway between the two clear.
The Project Director is the integrator – but needs a system that works
For decisions owned by the proponent, the Project Director should normally be the senior integrator.
That does not mean personally conducting every conversation or resolving every technical detail.
It means being accountable for the overall project proposition that emerges from the different disciplines, requirements, constraints, and opportunities.
Technical issues normally arrive in forms that project leadership can act upon.
So do cost, programme, consent, legal, and commercial risks.
What is the equivalent route for what is learned about people and place?
Does the Project Director receive:
“The community is concerned about the cable route.”
Or something closer to:
“This locally material issue is affected by the cable-corridor decision. That decision is approaching closure. Options A and B have materially different consequences. Fisheries knowledge, engineering, environmental evidence, consent requirements, cost, and programme need to be considered together before the decision closes.”
The second is something project leadership can integrate.
But for that to happen consistently, the organisation has to make it possible.
Engagement and Social Performance teams need credible routes to decision owners.
Technical, commercial, land, legal, environmental, regulatory, and delivery functions need to recognise relevant place-based knowledge as legitimate project evidence.
Project governance needs to make visible which consequential decisions are approaching and how open they remain.
Stage gates need a way of exposing unresolved material issues before choices become difficult or expensive to revisit.
Senior leaders need to be available where a trade-off exceeds the authority of the project team.
And the organisation needs to retain what it learns so that every new project does not begin again from zero.
That is organisational capability, not simply good individual project management.
Where does Social Performance fit?
In some organisations, much of this capability may already exist within a mature Social Performance function.
Social Performance can understand social context and impacts, work across organisational boundaries, challenge assumptions, and influence project decisions – all of which comes very close to what we are describing.
The important distinction is therefore not the department name.
It is the mandate and its connection to normal project decision-making.
If Social Performance already has the access, authority, and cross-functional reach needed to bring place-based knowledge into consequential decisions while relevant options remain open, an organisation may already possess much of this capability.
If it does not, changing somebody’s title will achieve very little.
And this eventually reaches the Board
Even an excellent Project Director operates inside a wider organisational system.
Boards, investment committees, and senior governance routinely examine technical risk, CAPEX, programme, consenting, legal exposure, revenue, financing, safety, and delivery confidence.
What is the equivalent view of the Fourth Pillar?
It should not be:
“Is the community happy?”
Nor is this likely to be solved by a single percentage labelled “community support”.
Local legitimacy and support are too complex, contextual, and partly outside the organisation’s control for that.
But senior governance can reasonably expect visibility over two things.
The first is the condition of the Fourth Pillar.
Are key relationships strengthening or deteriorating? Are material concerns unresolved? Are important commitments being met? Are conflict, redesign pressure, or organised opposition emerging? Is there credible evidence about how affected people judge the project and the process through which it is being developed?
The second is the strength of the capability behind it.
Are material issues reaching the relevant decisions? Are consequential choices still open when engagement occurs? Are rights and legitimate decision authority being recognised? Are significant trade-offs being escalated where necessary? Are material legitimacy risks being consciously accepted rather than quietly inherited? Is learning from one project changing the next?
A Board cannot instruct people to regard a project as legitimate.
And it should not try.
But Boards and equivalent senior governance can hold management accountable for whether the organisation has built and is using a credible capability for earning, understanding, and sustaining local legitimacy and support.
An accountability chain, rather than one missing job
Seen this way, there may be no single missing job.
There is an accountability chain.
Board and investment governance provide oversight of whether projects are sufficiently strong across all four pillars and whether material Fourth Pillar risks and uncertainties are understood.
Executive and development leadership build the organisational capability, governance, resources, incentives, and mandates.
The Project Director – or equivalent accountable project lead – integrates the different pillars into the overall project proposition and the consequential decisions owned by the proponent.
The Project Manager and specialist functions may coordinate and execute much of that integration in practice.
Engagement, Social Performance, engineering, environment, commercial, finance, land, legal, permitting, and other teams provide the relationships, knowledge, evidence, options, and challenge needed to make those decisions well.
And public authorities, rights-holders, communities, landowners, and other legitimate decision actors retain the authority and influence that properly belongs to them.
That is not another engagement model.
It is an architecture for project development in shared space.
Do we need a Director of Project–Place Integration?
Possibly.
But that is a secondary question.
An organisation may find that its Project Directors already have excellent support, its Social Performance function has genuine cross-functional reach, its decision gates expose material place-based issues, and its executives and Board receive meaningful visibility.
If so, another Director may add very little.
Another organisation may discover that nobody has the mandate to build this capability across the portfolio, strengthen decision pathways, support Project Directors, develop common methods, provide assurance, challenge organisational blind spots, and bring material Fourth Pillar issues into executive governance.
In that case, a dedicated senior function may make sense.
One possible title we have been testing is:
Director of Project–Place Integration
Not Director of Local Legitimacy – because an organisation cannot own or manufacture legitimacy.
Not simply Director of Community Engagement – because the mandate extends beyond engagement into the wider project-development system.
And not necessarily instead of Social Performance – because a mature Social Performance function may already be the natural home for much of the capability.
So the useful question is not:
“Do we need a Director of Project–Place Integration?”
It is:
“Do we already have the capability, mandate, governance, and accountability that such a role would exist to provide?”
If yes, strengthen it.
If partly, find the gaps.
If no, organisational design becomes part of the solution.
Success is not the absence of opposition
None of this promises unanimous agreement.
People can understand a project, participate meaningfully, be treated fairly, and still oppose it.
Different rights, values, interests, evidence, and views of the future can produce genuine disagreement.
So a strong Fourth Pillar should not be judged simply by whether objections disappear.
A more demanding test is whether material knowledge reached the decisions capable of acting upon it, whether important trade-offs were surfaced while choices remained open, whether legitimate rights and influence were recognised, whether constraints were genuine and transparent, and whether the project can explain what changed, what did not, and why.
The resulting project may proceed substantially as proposed.
It may become a better project.
It may move, change scale, use another route, alter its delivery arrangements, or share value differently.
And occasionally, the responsible conclusion may be that this particular proposition should pause, move elsewhere, or not proceed.
The aim of project development should not simply be to defend the first proposition.
It should be to discover a project capable of succeeding technically, financially, legally, and in the shared place in which it must exist.
One practical organisational test
Take something genuinely material that has been learned from people affected by a live project.
Then ask:
Where does it go?
Can the team identify the consequential decision?
Who legitimately owns that decision?
When does it close?
Can relevant local knowledge, rights, technical evidence, commercial realities, and other constraints be worked through together?
Can the Project Director act on the result?
Can an unresolved issue reach an executive with sufficient authority?
And, if it is material enough, would the Board, investment committee, or equivalent senior governance ever know?
If that chain works reliably, the organisation may already have substantial Fourth Pillar Capability – whatever it calls it.
If the chain breaks, the problem may not be the quality of the engagement.
It may be the project-development system around it.
And that is a very different problem to solve.
This is an ELSA working proposition that we are continuing to test with project proponents, communities, rights-holders, authorities, researchers, and practitioners. For the underlying engagement-to-decision argument, see When engagement cannot reach the consequential decision. For the wider Fourth Pillar case, see From Three Pillars to Four.
