Our position is that a feasibility study has only done its job if it was genuinely free to conclude the project should not proceed. Public and private projects are too often presented as inevitable well before the technical, commercial, environmental, and institutional questions around them have been fully tested — and once a project has been treated as a foregone conclusion, the feasibility process tends to shift, quietly and often unintentionally, from testing the decision to confirming it.
We favour feasibility work that tests alternatives honestly rather than validating a preferred option, that challenges demand assumptions rather than adopting the sponsor’s own forecasts at face value, that examines lifecycle costs rather than construction cost in isolation, and that identifies — explicitly, not as an afterthought — the institutional capacity required to operate the finished asset once it is built. A study that skips any of these is not simply incomplete; it is answering an easier question than the one that actually determines whether a project should go ahead.
This discipline is what protects capital, not what delays it. The cost of a rigorous early-stage assessment is consistently small compared with the cost of correcting a weak project after contracts have been signed and construction is under way — and by the time that correction becomes necessary, the capital already committed is precisely what makes walking away from a bad project so much harder than it should have been.
AFR