With further emancipation of once subdued or marginalized stakeholders, a growing number of megaprojects face increasingly significant social resistance. Asymmetries of support for the projects emerge, rooted in different perceptions of legitimacy across different stakeholder groups. In this paper, we ask how these diverging perceptions of legitimacy develop across stakeholders of cross-border megaprojects. We conduct a multi-site ethnography at one of the biggest contemporary cross-border transport megaprojects in the world – the Danish/German Fehmarnbelt Fixed Link. Tying together three streams of the legitimacy literature in a new analytical approach, we suggest three dimensions of project legitimacy perception: trust, majority, and morality. In doing so, we provide a new integrative model of legitimacy perception in megaprojects. We illustrate how these legitimacy dimensions dynamically interact. We thus provide new insights on how project legitimacy is continuously renegotiated in megaprojects with implications for future developments of project governance.

随着利益攸关者曾一度屈服或边缘化的进一步解放，越来越多的大型项目面临越来越严重的社会抵制。对项目的支持出现了不对称现象，其根源在于不同利益相关者群体对合法性的不同理解。在本文中，我们要问这些关于合法性的不同看法如何在跨境大型项目的利益相关者之间发展。我们在世界上最大的当代跨境交通大型项目之一-丹麦/德国Fehmarnbelt固定链接项目中进行多站点民族志研究。通过一种新的分析方法将合法性文献的三个流放在一起，我们提出了项目合法性感知的三个维度：信任，多数和道德。通过这样做，我们为大型项目提供了一种新的合法性感知整合模型。我们说明了这些合法性维度是如何动态交互的。因此，我们提供了有关在大型项目中如何持续重新谈判项目合法性的新见解，这对项目治理的未来发展具有影响。