Some foreign-invested megaprojects have encountered significant grassroots resistance, while others face little opposition, despite clear social and environmental misconduct. International business scholarship does not explain why megaprojects with similarly destructive impacts (e.g., displacements, pollution) do not uniformly face grassroots resistance. This paper uses a legitimacy-as-perception approach to analyse how and when grassroots communities develop a collective grassroots resistance. Our framework provides a holistic interpretation of legitimacy as a collective social judgment, formed by aggregating individual cross-level and interrelated perceptions of the megaproject, firm, host, and home governments. It recognizes the non-monolithic nature of a community, portraying it as agentic entity with distinct perspectives. It contends that collective social judgment and social structures are intertwined, offering a nuanced understanding of the intricate relationship between grassroots communities and the evolving dynamics of legitimacy. Therefore, it enables a more nuanced understanding of the emergence of a collective response (of acceptance, ambivalence, resistance) against megaprojects led by foreign MNEs. Megaprojects do not exist in isolation. Thus, this integrated local approach calls for a comprehensive restructuring of systems and structures involving all stakeholders engaged in megaprojects.
