Conceptualizing and Assimilating the Theme of Sustainable Project Management: A Chronological Review

Abstract

Sustainable management of corporate operations is considered to be one of the key pressing issues of the 21st century. Integration of sustainability criteria into strategy as well as corporate operations is an emergent and well-known tendency across the major industries. Nevertheless, projects have an important role to play in achieving the broader sustainable development goals, yet the academic interest in studying sustainability in conjunction with the projects has just started taking a pace. The literature on project management and sustainability varies in terms of approach, methods adopted as well as the different perspectives adopted by researchers. This review paper aims to integrate and assimilate the sequential developments in the field of Sustainable Project Management (SPM) by chronologically reviewing the relevant publications mostly over the span of the last two decades. The search results were scrutinized in three stages using an identical analytical construct approach. Using the major databases as sources, this paper presents a comprehensive review of the published literature with a specific focus on the key contributions of prominent authors in the field of sustainable project management. Major findings of the study specifically elaborate SPM as a new school of thought in project management literature, different phases in SPM research and explicitly underlines the key contributions in the field in chronological order. This study is unique in terms of its approach and methodology as the chronological reviews in the context of managing sustainability in projects are quite elusive. In terms of contribution, this study will help to further our current understanding of managing sustainability in projects by elaborating and synthesizing the existing SPM research.