In an increasing competitive and globalizing business world the question of governance remains a highly debated and contentious issue. With different countries adopting various approaches towards corporate governance, the question remain; "how do global, large capital projects, engaging multiple companies across multiple countries, establish and adhere to common governance principles?” Examples exist where project stakeholders decided to either adopt the host country's corporate governance principles or the investing country's corporate governance guidelines.
Both approaches resulted in success and failure, posting the question whether governance guidelines should not be developed per project. The reasoning evolved into the development of the concept of project governance, established for specific multi-national, global projects.
We provide an update on the research towards the establishment of a project governance model for global, large capital, projects (LCPs). It provides an overview of the performance of LCPs, their characteristics and importance as well as developments towards improving their success rate by creating a governing environment within which projects are setup and managed for success. Although many smaller capital projects, such as some software developments, can also be classified as global, this study focuses on large capital engineering projects. In modern times nearly all of these projects involves multiple countries as shareholders, financiers, contractors and service providers and can be safely termed as truly global.