Building Trust and Support for Partnership Agendas through the Requisites of Early Community Involvement

Abstract

One of the aims of the sustainable development goals (SDGs) is infrastructural development. In pursuance of this goal, partnerships and collaborations remain key responses. Thus, Goal 17, which is the climax of the SDGs, revolves around partnering with private investors to generate the required capital for the attainment of said developmental goals. Using some public-private partnership (PPP) projects as case study, this paper aims to analyse how early involvement or non-involvement influences the project communities to trust the project handlers and give support towards sustainable infrastructural development. The researcher applied qualitative method data gathering techniques and analysis. Findings show that communities that seemed to have been well engaged at the initial stages only experienced ‘therapeutic’ and ‘manipulative’ involvement because firstly there was a flagrant disregard for initial agreed-upon principles and tenets of inclusive governance and secondly the promoters of the collaborations did not do enough to have an all-inclusive advocacy with community groups. The study recommends that the law governing the implementation of PPP in Lagos State be modified to allow community representatives feature prominently on the committee for infrastructural projects right from the initial stage through the entire process.