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Managing Risk Across the Infrastructure Project Lifecycle

Infrastructure owners, developers and their counsel are operating in the most volatile geopolitical environment in decades. State and non-state actors act with growing impunity; hostilities put energy and physical assets in the crosshairs; regulatory pendulums could significantly impact projects with decade-long horizons; and artificial intelligence is reshaping the landscape as fast as it is disrupting it.

None of these forces is new — what is new is how quickly they now compound one another, from a tanker seized in the Gulf to a permit stalled by a change in government to a community that no longer trusts the developer at its doorstep. The challenge is not to track more headlines. It is to cut through the noise, identify which risks actually matter to a given project in a given jurisdiction and build the muscle to respond before those risks become crises.

Where the Pressure Is Building

Energy Transition and Policy Risk
Interconnection queues and permitting timelines are stretching out even as demand from data centers and reshored manufacturing accelerates. State-level rate cases and utility oversight add further uncertainty, and federal policy has become its own pendulum: shifting tax credit and incentive rules can just as easily help one energy-intensive project’s site selection or economics as hurt another’s.

That pendulum cuts deeper than incentives alone. The swing back toward pro-hydrocarbon and energy-security policy spurred by conflict in Ukraine and now the Middle East sits in tension with rising energy costs, a tension that should in principle push the market to alternatives like wind, nuclear, and solar.

Digital Infrastructure Scrutiny
Data center planning increasingly runs into community opposition, a dynamic likely to intensify as cost-of-living pressures compound local frustration. Other types of infrastructure face similar pushback, making early engagement essential. Furthermore, as digital assets multiply, so does the need to anticipate — and meet — regulators’ rising cybersecurity and network-resilience expectations.

Reputational and Stakeholder Risk
Public trust is low, and community opposition has repeatedly delayed or derailed infrastructure development. Activist and non-governmental organization pressure, particularly around energy and digital assets, must be anticipated well before it hardens into organized resistance.

Operational and Supply Chain Disruption
Macro trends, labor constraints, port and logistics dependencies and long-lead equipment risk all converge on the same vulnerability: the project’s supply chain. Any one of these can derail a schedule; increasingly, they arrive together.

What “Right” Looks Like

Companies that manage risk well tend to share seven habits that separate them from those unprepared:

Intelligence & assessment: Build timely, authoritative threat intelligence and continuously assess risks to anticipate changes in the company’s risk profile.
Integrated risk management: Embed geopolitical and other emerging threats into enterprise risk management, compliance programs and gap remediation efforts.
Opportunity & resilience: Identify business opportunities created by market disruptions while strengthening crisis preparedness and business continuity.
Leadership & execution: Enable rapid, transparent decision-making and agile responses through clear governance and escalation processes.

A Lifecycle Framework for Managing Risk

Geopolitical, regulatory and stakeholder risk does not appear at a single point in a project’s life — it evolves continuously, from the moment a deal is contemplated through decades of operation. Effective risk management maps directly onto that lifecycle:

PHASE 1	PHASE 2	PHASE 3	PHASE 4
Dealmaking & Due Diligence	Permitting, Planning & Community Engagement	Construction & Project Execution	Operations & Incident Preparedness

Phase 1 — Dealmaking & Due Diligence
Long before financial close, solid due diligence is comprised of several components:

Non-technical risk assessment: Anticipating security and reputational risks from community-based activists and local stakeholders, paired with scenario planning around national and sub-national political developments.
Pre-deal policy and regulatory vulnerability assessment: Identifying policy and regulatory exposure early enough to build concrete mitigation plans before execution.
Reputational diligence: Examining risks that can arise from joint venture partners, project location, or operational choices.
Customer and supply chain due diligence: Mapping regulatory, legal, financial and reputational risk in counterparties — including nation-state exposure — to determine where contract terms can manage the risk.
Technical diligence: Stress-testing forecast costs and schedules for ongoing capital projects to surface delivery risk before it erodes deal value.

In practice, this looks like vetting an acquisition target’s principals and track record, or a prospective joint venture partner’s ties against a client’s own sanctions exposure. The value is rarely in confirming what is already suspected — it lies in surfacing risks that would otherwise be invisible until it is too late to price them in the project.

Phase 2 — Permitting, Planning & Community Engagement
Permitting risk rarely emerges from regulation itself — it comes from being caught by surprise. Four disciplines have to run in parallel from the outset:

Project advocacy: Build a plan around every anticipated hearing, approval and milestone in the corporate development timeline, so that the project team is never negotiating on its back foot.
Stakeholder activation: Map and engage local, state, national and cross-border audiences before opposition has a chance to organize — understanding a community’s specific concerns is what turns a neutral audience into a supportive one.
Public affairs: Apply a consistent lens across every phase, calibrating the timing and substance of public communication to protect negotiating position and avoid handing critics a rallying point.
Narrative control: Drive the external narrative deliberately rather than letting the opposition define it. Engage in public hearings in ways that demonstrate support instead of giving critics a platform, and operate with the transparency that builds durable trust rather than short-term goodwill.

Phase 3 — Construction & Project Execution
The economics of delivering large capital expenditure (capex) portfolios have shifted. Traditional single-point-of-accountability contracting has given way to fragmented risk-sharing — clients now own more execution risk, even as equipment and labor grow scarcer and interfaces multiply. Newer delivery models respond by locking in capacity earlier, building in collaboration and diversifying supplier exposure, all at the cost of more interfaces, a bigger execution role and more risk ownership for the client. Contracting and supply chain management remain necessary but aren’t sufficient alone.

Organizations that avoid capex blowouts can identify a project drifting off track and react before the drift compounds. This rests on early-warning governance, clear accountability and repeatable ways of working. Project controls become a competitive advantage: an early-warning system, a way to monitor risk as metrics, and a record that substantiates a company’s position in a dispute.

Phase 4 — Operations & Incident Preparedness (Ongoing)
Risk management does not end at commissioning. Crisis and incident response management means building and testing scenario planning and response protocols across community activism, operations and cybersecurity. Freedom to operate has to be earned continuously through ongoing relationship-building and advocacy with regulators, government, media and the community. Ongoing monitoring should break down internal silos and align legal, compliance, operations and communications around a shared picture. Ultimately, vulnerability assessments only matter if they feed back into real efforts.

Leading From the General Counsel’s Seat

Across all four phases, the legal team sits at the center of advocacy success but cannot carry it alone. Legal identifies the end goal and specific risks, stands up working groups, reviews public communications, scenario plans and coordinates with compliance on filings. Public affairs, government relations, and communications craft group strategy around permitting timelines, maintain a stakeholder list across every layer of approval and execute an advocacy plan that gets key messages to policymakers.

The organizations that do this well treat it as one integrated effort. A communications misstep can create legal exposure as easily as a legal misstep can create a reputational one.

Key Takeaways

The throughline across dealmaking, permitting, construction and operations is the same: geopolitical, regulatory and stakeholder risks are conditions that require continuous management. Organizations that understand the risk landscape dynamics know where they’re least prepared, catch legal issues before decisions narrow options and build data streams, cross-functional integration and crisis muscle memory before they are necessary. Such organizations will be well positioned to turn today’s volatile environment into a source of competitive advantage.