The Project of Sustainability: The Role of Project Management in Developing a More Sustainable Economy and Society

This research project intend to investigate the role of the Project Management (PM) profession in developing a sustainable economy. Sustainability has acquired a growing strategic importance over the last 10 years bringing with it a requirement for changes in traditional practices and paradigms of production for its successful implementation. These changes are typically managed as projects and delivered by dedicated project managers, that are assumed, have the knowledge and skills to take into account the social, financial, political, cultural and environmental sustainability of a project. As such project managers, through their distinctive roles, skills and competences occupy an important position in accomplishing sustainability, but little is understood about how they do this.

Using qualitative methods such as interviews, content analysis and ethnographic observation, I will focus on how sustainability is incorporated in PM discourse and practice by studying: how the profession makes sense of sustainability, and also sustainability in practice.

The topic of the research project is very timely as it addresses a growing interest on the topic of sustainability. The expected contributions of this research will be in: (a) explaining the institutionalization of sustainability within PM professional practices; (b) identifying under what conditions project managers adopt sustainability practices; (c) conceptualizing sustainability in PM contexts.