When the Warnow tunnel concession (see this issue of World Tunnelling, p 65 et seq.) was awarded, it soon emerged that the traffic forecasts had to be corrected to include user charges. Once that correction had been made, it was clear the project needed substantial public subsidies. The project...

Large infrastructure projects are being planned and designed all over the world. As these projects require state funding and have a strong spatial and environmental impact, they tend to figure prominently in all parts of the national political ball game. Though the physical results of...

As megaprojects have become ubiquitous, their real benefits and costs have come under increased scrutiny. We interviewed Bent Flyvbjerg, who has extensively studied megaproject development. Flyvbjerg has found systematic problems in the development process: by intentionally misrepresenting...

The Oxford Handbook of Megaproject Management provides state-of-the-art scholarship in the emerging field of megaproject management. Megaprojects are large, complex projects which typically cost billions of dollars and impact millions of people, like building a high-speed rail line, a megadam, a...

The suggestion to make a Chinese translation of Megaprojects and Risk: An Anatomy of Ambition was particularly welcome. The book is about how to plan and deliver megaprojects in ways that secure successful outcomes. Megaprojects are highly risky and often go wrong, even in China. Some have gone...

We identify and document a new principle of economic behavior: the principle of the Malevolent Hiding Hand. In a famous discussion, Albert Hirschman celebrated the Hiding Hand, which he saw as a benevolent mechanism by which unrealistically optimistic planners embark on unexpectedly challenging...

Albert O. Hirschman's principle of the Hiding Hand stands stronger and more celebrated today than ever. The principle states that ignorance is good in planning, because if decision makers knew the real costs and difficulties of projects, few ventures would ever get started. The paper presents...

This special issue asks, “Do classics exist in megaproject management?” We identify three types of classics: conventional, Kuhnian, and citation classics. We find that the answer to our question depends on the definition of “classic” employed. First, “citation classics” do exist in...