Understanding How Cultural Differences Affect Project Performance and Technology Adoption by Users

Global Change Projects (GCPs) are large, multinational projects that are the vehicle to enable strategic change for corporations, governments and foundations. Many GCPs take several decades from original initiation to full-scale operation. Shaping the project, finding funding, creating partnerships and fitting the initiative to the numerous interests of different stakeholders can take as long as 10 to 20 years. The sprint phase of the actual, physical realization of the project typically takes at least five years and the ramp-up phase at least additional two to three years. After these phases, the life cycle of the end result can be centuries. It is well known by agencies such as The World Bank that significant differences between sponsors' and other stakeholders' goals, values and cultural norms can impose large "institutional costs" on their global change projects. In their own project reviews, they have estimated that fewer than 30% of their projects achieve their stated performance objectives. However, the current state of knowledge does not allow The World Bank or other sponsors of GCPs to estimate the magnitude of a given project's institutional costs, nor to plan interventions to mitigate them. This paper focuses firstly on the causes of institutional costs in GCPs. Secondly, the paper discusses the background for research that we are initiating to create tools to estimate and control the institutional costs in initiating, planning, executing and maintaining the results of GCPs.