Prior and governed stakeholder relationships: The key to resilience of inter-organizational projects

•Resilience of inter-organizational projects is under-researched in the project management literature.•Many prior ties among stakeholders promote resilience through social solidarity, few prior ties promote resilience through freedom to be vigilant.•Contractual governance improves resilience by clarifying roles and responsibilities of stakeholders, while relational governance improves resilience by forming collective cognition.•Plural governance design based on prior ties among stakeholders promotes dynamically distributed and centralized stakeholder engagement to improve resilience of the inter-organizational project.