South Africa’s infrastructure ambitions remain high, but fiscal headroom is tight, and emphasis on cost efficiency and delivery certainty has never mattered more. However, international experience suggests that infrastructure projects rarely unravel because of engineering errors. More often, they falter when stakeholder misalignment breaks down.
Globally, we see the same faultlines emerge again and again – communities engaged once plans are already fixed, governance structures that fragment accountability, and coordination failures that only surface once construction is already underway.
In the absence of stakeholder engagement, perspectives can clash, leading to delays, disputes, cost escalations, and reputational damage.
In other words, just as infrastructure must be planned in relation to other infrastructure to ensure closer integration and long-term coherence, the same logic must be applied to stakeholders. Communities, regulators, municipalities, investors, and delivery partners operate within a shared ecosystem. When those relationships are established early, duplication falls away, efficiencies are unlocked, and long-term value is strengthened across the entire delivery chain.
When all relevant stakeholders are meaningfully involved from the beginning, projects benefit from shared ownership and smoother implementation.
Embedding alignment at the design stage
Stakeholder engagement must form part of the core delivery architecture, integrated into project prioritisation, governance, financing, and risk management from the outset as a key structural consideration. Projects must account for long-term social, economic, and governance outcomes alongside engineering feasibility and cost. Alignment should be tested at the prioritisation stage, before capital is committed or any differences escalate into disputes.
Global experience illustrates precisely why this sequencing matters.
In Australia, a 2024 New South Wales (NSW) parliamentary review of the Sydney Metro West project reported stakeholder complaints that early design priorities had placed disproportionate emphasis on achieving a 20-minute journey time between Parramatta and the Sydney CBD.
Community members and stakeholders argued that connectivity, station spacing, and corridor integration should have carried greater weight instead, necessitating additional stations and adjustments to planning. Addressing this issue was likely to lead to cost overruns and delivery delays, demonstrating how front-end assumptions, when insufficiently tested across stakeholder groups, can seriously impact project outcomes and increase complexity.
The Berlin Brandenburg Airport offers an even more severe illustration of the point. Originally scheduled to open in 2011, the airport finally commenced operations in October 2020 – nearly nine years late, and with total costs rising from an initial estimate of roughly €2-3 billion to more than €7 billion.
Over the course of construction, multiple opening dates were withdrawn as technical issues, late-stage scope changes, and coordination failures accumulated.
Post-project reviews highlighted governance weaknesses, blurred lines of accountability between public shareholders, fragmented contractor coordination, and weak risk allocation as central contributors. What began as a regional infrastructure upgrade became one of Europe’s most cited examples of how stakeholder misalignment can magnify costs and delays over time.
The commercial imperative
Unfortunately, however, a persistent belief remains that early engagement slows project delivery, where in practice, late engagement slows delivery. As leading public infrastructure development partners, Gap Infrastructure Corporation (GIC) has seen repeatedly that projects move fastest when consensus is achieved before designs are finalised.
Structured early alignment tends to produce what we describe as “hidden wins” – benefits that may not appear in feasibility spreadsheets, but materially affect performance:
- Fewer redesign cycles after community objections
- Increased community satisfaction and reduced risk of objections
- Faster regulatory approvals
- Greater investor confidence
- Stronger long-term asset performance and value
So, far from being a luxury, stakeholder engagement is a commercial necessity that should be treated with the same rigour and standards as engineering or financial structuring. It requires structured stakeholder mapping at project inception, clear feedback loops during evaluation, and ongoing coordination throughout implementation.
Ultimately, for South Africa to maximise return on investment with swifter, more bankable infrastructure delivery, the hidden variable is not technical complexity but stakeholder engagement. Stakeholder alignment is infrastructure strategy.
Written by Roelof van den Berg, CEO of Gap Infrastructure Corporation (GIC)