Beyond HM Treasury's Green Book – From Auxiliary to Core: New Project Governance for Climate-Contested Land Use Projects through the Open- Praxis-Graph Research Methodology

OKeeffe, Dennis

Beyond HM Treasury's Green Book – From Auxiliary to Core: New Project Governance for Climate-Contested Land Use Projects through the Open- Praxis-Graph Research Methodology

conference contribution

posted on 2025-10-30, 14:37 authored by Dennis OKeeffeDennis OKeeffe

Public-sector infrastructure projects increasingly unfold amid intersecting crises of climate breakdown, biodiversity loss, and digital dissent. I introduce Climate-Contested Land Use Projects (CCLUPs)—a novel typology defined by ecological risk, democratic contestation, and institutional fragility. These dynamics expose the epistemic limits of the United Kingdom’s (UK’s) HM Treasury’s Green Book and its globally emulated economic rationalism, rooted in utilitarian neoclassic economic abstraction and derived ultimately from Cartesian dualism.In response, I advance the Open-Praxis-Graph (O-P-G) as a Transdisciplinary Research Methodology (TRM), grounded in social ontology. O-P-G conjoins three umbrella concepts as terms of art: Open (public digital data environments), Praxis (social ontologies of situated meaning), and Graph (semantic network analysis informed by modern graph theory). Applied to the National Health Service (NHS) Velindre Cancer Centre—a paradigmatic CCLUP—O-P-G as a TRM reveals how affective dissent, material entanglements, and normative pluralism constitute the front-end phase realities of CCLUPs.Supporting SEEDS 2025’s call to make sustainability foundational, I argue that O-P-G offers a necessary realignment of land-use governance in the front-end phase of CCLUPs. By rethinking such public-sector infrastructure as a site of contested value and temporal struggle, I advocate a pluralist, transdisciplinary methodology rooted in ecological justice and democratic legitimacy.