Integrating sustainability into project risk management; an application in PPP projects

2019 Canadian Society for Civil Engineering. All rights reserved. Public private partnership (PPP) has been recognized as a potential model for delivery of sustainable infrastructure. The long-duration and risk-sharing mechanisms of PPP provide a unique opportunity for fostering innovation and driving sustainable development. However, efficiency gains from these features can be materialized only through effective implementation. In PPP projects, sole reliance on the traditional project management procedures and processes limits scope of decision making to the contract duration and the contracting parties. For more informed decision-making, it is useful to align the management of large infrastructure projects with the core values of sustainability assessment focusing both short- and long-term impacts of the project and the changing project environment during its life cycle. In particular, such limitations in approach result in a rigid treatment of risk during the risk assessment focusing only on the iron-triangle project controls; time, cost, quality. The integration of sustainability into the project management framework is a relatively new concept. In particular, little work has been done on its integration with project risk management framework (PRM). The existing PRM needs to be improved for inclusion of sustainability considerations for efficient management of complex infrastructure projects, especially PPPs. Thus, a systematic literature review of articles ranging from year 2000-2018 has been carried out to propose a three areas of integration for sustainability and PPP referred as: policy, process, and product. The process approach has been further elaborated into three levels of sustainability assessment integrated in project management; macro, meso, micro. At the meso level, risk and sustainability integration has been proposed. The study has long ranging implications for furthering the understanding of risk-sustainability cause-effect chains (opportunity-threat interaction) for developing a decision-support system for sustainability inclusive risk assessment. Overall, the study presents a novel framework for a budding research line helping decision makers to better explore the opportunities created through sustainability for large infrastructure projects and realize long-term project success.