You Can’t Always Have It Both Ways: The Megaproject Legitimacy Dilemma and the Speed–Accountability Tension

Megaprojects face a legitimacy dilemma: Accelerating delivery enhances pragmatic legitimacy but can weaken moral legitimacy, whereas stronger accountability reverses this effect, with cognitive legitimacy shaping how this tension is evaluated under fuzziness. Existing research offers limited insight into how it is managed. This thoughtlet develops a legitimacy framework grounded in legitimacy theory and the Five Hands lens. It argues that legitimacy evolves through shifting trade-offs and paradoxes rather than fixed zero-sum choices. The Fifth Hand embodies adaptive governance through reflexive coordination, enabling actors to prioritize, sequence, recombine, and reinterpret responses as contexts, incentives, and interpretations evolve across the project life cycle.