The Four Major Rivers Restoration Project (FMRRP) was a large-scale, government-led river restoration project in South Korea. This research documents and analyses the FMRRP to better understand the challenges in planning and implementing such projects. The ‘planner’s triangle’ is the conceptual framework around which we organised the relationships and conflicts between stakeholders, one that acknowledges the environmental, economic and equity aspects of the project. In addition to these three customary aspects of the planners’ triangle, we found that stakeholder (dis)trust in government may be yet another significant dimension in such projects. The data and documentation were obtained from publicly available literature, together with semi-structured stakeholder interviews. We propose a modified framework with which to better understand conflicts and controversies in large-scale, government-led sustainable-development projects.