Development of a predictive coalition building analysis for stakeholders of sociotechnical systems: case studies of high-speed rail development in the Northeast Corridor of the United States and the Tōhoku Shinkansen extension from Hachinohe to Shin-Aomori, Japan

Abstract

This thesis lays out the intellectual underpinnings and the motivation for a visual, transparent, and user-friendly predictive stakeholder analysis tool for planners and project managers to better understand future uncertainties in institutional structures and cooperative relationships surrounding large, complex, multi-stakeholder infrastructure and transportation projects. We present the development of Predictive Coalition Building Analysis (PCBA). The three-phase methodological framework assigns likelihoods to possible future coalitions of stakeholders by 1) identifying and discussing stakeholders and their interests in various objectives for system development, 2) clustering stakeholders based on their similar interests, and 3) attributing salience to each stakeholder and cluster to discuss incentives and barriers to collective action. We apply PCBA to two case studies of complex, multi-stakeholder high-speed rail (HSR) systems: 1) the Northeast Corridor (NEC) in the United States, and 2) the Tōhoku Shinkansen extension from Hachinohe to Shin-Aomori, Japan. In the NEC case, we test PCBA for its sensitivity and robustness to perturbations, demonstrating that the tool responds to small changes in the institutional context in meaningful ways. This highlights the usefulness of PCBA as a tool for exploring different future scenarios and understanding the uncertainty of stakeholder relationships and coalitions surrounding the system or project of study. In the case of the Tōhoku Shinkansen extension, we are able to directly verify the predictive validity of the coalition likelihood results obtained from PCBA by comparing them with what actually happened through the planning, construction, and start of revenue service (1994-2012). This thesis lays the foundation for future research and application into PCBA. As a tool developed for professional application, the strength of this tool lies in its usability, transparency, and communicability. We have demonstrated that PCBA can provide real, predictive insight at a macro-scale to help explore uncertainties in stakeholder relationships, making it valuable for policy-makers who want to easily understand and visualize the broad institutional context of the system. While the case studies in this thesis explore high-speed rail development, the author asserts that this tool could be useful for exploring other sociotechnical systems within and beyond the transportation domain, even more so as the tool continues to develop.