Despite the importance of stakeholders in project governance, project management literature lacks from an inclusive framework which defines the roles, relationships and positions of internal and external stakeholders inside and outside of the organization's governance structure. This paper has the purpose to report a review on project governance literature to draw attention to the context within which the stakeholders are positioned, to extract their roles and relationships inside and outside of the organization and to develop new avenues for research regarding stakeholders in project governance. The conducted thematic analysis reveals that there are three contexts influencing organization's approaches towards stakeholders: success, megaprojects and ethics. The developed conceptual framework illustrates that organizations are in direct contact with external stakeholders at the organizational level and project level. Strategic decisions made at the organizational level are operationalised at the portfolio level and influence the approach towards external stakeholders at the project level. Considering the lack of theories to support general doctrine of stakeholder theory, this research suggests that future governance researchers adopt a broader view in selection of theoretical lenses in order to include the social and psychological aspects of the management of external stakeholders.

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This article presents the emergence and evolution of actors and institutions in a collaborative program from the strategic planning to the execution and delivery phase. The ethnographic study of a collaboration revealed that, while formal regulations are prerequisites for initiating collaborations, further drivers of the interactions between program participants are oriented by path dependency, cultural familiarities, and goal sharing. This article shows that many microdynamics exist among actors and institutions inside the governance structure, co-evolving in parallel with the transition through the program’s phases. There are, however, two main drivers orienting these dynamics: formal regulations and trust.