Public participation in infrastructure projects: an integrative review and prospects for the future research

Purpose In the past few decades, traditional project management theories mainly focused on quality, cost and schedule. However, with larger scale and wider influence of infrastructure projects, especially in megaprojects, social problems have gradually become pressing issues in the field of project governance. As the public is the main body of society, public participation has attracted the attention from both the academic field and industry field. Despite people are gradually realizing the significance of public participation, a deeper and more systematic understanding is still needed to be developed in this field. Therefore, this paper aims to conduct a systematic literature review on public participation in infrastructure projects. Based on existing literatures, this paper draws a knowledge map and develops a research framework in this field. Also, this paper tries to provide some theoretical and practical directions for the future. Design/methodology/approach In total, 142 papers from Web of Science Core collection were selected to be used in this systematic review. Quantitative analysis of this paper is concentrated on the knowledge map with bibliometric tools. Qualitative analysis is concentrated on identifying the research framework. Findings This paper reviewed existing literatures and the results are as below. Firstly, the results show a knowledge map containing knowledge domains, knowledge frontiers and knowledge evolution of research fields in public participation. Secondly, the results indicate a research framework in this field, including situational dimension, implementation dimension, individual dimension and influence dimension. Moreover, each dimension has several research topics, respectively. Finally, according to the results, the paper proposes practical suggestions for stakeholders and research directions for further study. Originality/value It is the first paper to draw a holistic knowledge map and build up a multilevel framework for public participation in the field of infrastructure projects. This paper bridges the gap in both quantitative and qualitative identification of existing literatures in this field. Besides, this paper proposes some practical suggestions and research directions for further study and development of public participation.