When Politics Backs a Project but Erodes Its Legitimacy: Political Influence and Community Acceptance of Major Infrastructure

Social licence to operate (SLO) research has increasingly modelled community acceptance of major projects around constructs such as procedural and distributional fairness, accountability, trust in government and trust in developers, community engagement, and the perceived balance of benefits and risks (Moffat & Zhang, 2014; Zhang & Moffat, 2015; Otor, Bice, & Henderson, 2026). Political influence, however, has remained conceptually acknowledged but empirically unexplored as a formal construct in these models. This study addresses that gap by extending Otor, Bice, and Henderson's (2026) SLO for Infrastructure Model, introducing Political Influence as a new exogenous construct that captures communities' perceptions that political, rather than technical or community, considerations drive infrastructure decisions. This work speaks directly to the Environmental Politics and Policy section's concerns, and resonates with the conference's broader focus on 'Politics, power and the polycrisis'. Public acceptance of 'Australia's big build' sits at the intersection of environmental policy, politics, and community resilience, particularly around the renewable energy transition, sustainable transport, and water security. By showing how political influence shapes community legitimacy judgements on infrastructure, the paper contributes an environmental-politics perspective on politicisation and governance central to the section's remit. We test whether perceived politicisation operates as an upstream antecedent that erodes the legitimacy-building mechanisms through which the base model explains community acceptance. Using partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) on survey data from 1,609 local community residents affected by major linear infrastructure in Australia, we find that Political Influence is associated with consistently lower perceptions of Accountability, Trust in Government, and Community Engagement, with no association with Community Trust. Political Influence also markedly heightens Perceived Risk and, contrary to our initial expectation of no association, is associated with substantially lower Perceived Benefits. Mediation analysis reveals a paradox: Political Influence has a relatively small but significant positive direct effect on Community Acceptance, yet its larger, negative indirect effects, transmitted through several mediating pathways, produce a significantly negative total effect on Community Acceptance. Because our acceptance measure captures degree of toleration rather than active endorsement, we interpret this pattern as consistent with resigned acceptance: residents may cease contesting a project once its approval is perceived as politically settled, even as political influence undermines the legitimacy-building mechanisms social licence depends on. These findings extend both Social Exchange Theory accounts of social licence and the SLO for Infrastructure Model itself to incorporate the political dimension of infrastructure legitimacy, suggesting that infrastructure proponents and regulators should treat perceived political influence as a distinct, and double-edged, driver of community acceptance.