Local community's engagement and enactment of social value from hydropower infrastructure

Purpose Social needs of local community are highly essential in the context of public infrastructure and have an impact on their performance. This paper explores the local community subjectivity in interaction with primary stakeholders to deepen our understanding of social value and this category of misunderstood stakeholders. Design/methodology/approach The paper presents a partnership framework that aims to help stakeholders be reflexive and construct knowledge about social value of the infrastructure. The empirical material includes an extensive review of the public infrastructure documents published between 1981 and 2021 and 13 interviews with key members of local community. Findings The main contribution of this study is an integrated model to study the social value of an infrastructure and a dynamic approach to study how a local community engages and enacts social value. The dynamic approach highlights three plans of stakeholder’s subjectivity, which are relational, representational and operational plans to promote inclusive stakeholder’s management (“of” and “for”). Originality/value The study combines an analytical and a theoretical framework to investigate the enactment of social value.