Community-centric model for evaluating social value in projects

Increasing public participation in infrastructure projects elicits the need for a rationalized approach for quantifying value creation in the societal context. Although economic and environmental viability may be relatively easy to quantify, theories for quantitative evaluation of social performance and underlying social value creation in public infrastructure projects from a community perspective remain unexplored. This paper argues that the needs and requirements of the community should be at the core in planning for infrastructure projects. The success and failure of these projects should be intrinsically linked to the social value being created for the community at large. Addressing this knowledge gap, this paper develops a community-centric framework by considering public viewpoints at the core of infrastructure planning across a range of project characteristics. Based on social network theory, four key stakeholder networks - interest, impact, communication, and satisfaction networks - are investigated and the underlying network measures are then used to compute mathematically the social performance index (SPI) of the entire project. The SPI is then compared with a threshold value so that an acceptable level of social performance can be ensured while planning the project. The application of the framework is demonstrated in a case study project. The research contributes new knowledge in evaluation of public projects across planning, business, and construction management literature.