Governance for Safety in Inter-Organisational Project Networks

This chapter advances the understanding of what constitutes governance for safety in the context of inter-organisational project networks, comprising multiple autonomous organisations and which interests need to be aligned in order to achieve a joint system-level goal. It focuses on project network governance elements to coordinate, adapt and safeguard work between autonomous project actors. The chapter describes the key elements associated with governance in safety-critical inter-organisational project networks. Goal setting seeks to create shared performance goals for the project that are properly understood by all project actors. Rewarding refers to aligning actors’ goals with project goals by means of incentives. Monitoring seeks to ensure that all actors behave as expected, thereby enabling the use of performance-based incentives. Coordination is required to align the behaviour of each actor so that they can effectively work together. Capability building ensures that project actors have adequate abilities and potential to meet performance expectations.