Yongkui Li

Architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) projects are central to international development, where success emphasizes long-term development outcomes and sustainability. However, AEC projects are inherently environmentally intensive, and higher potential environmental impact often triggers greater regulation, coordination, and implementation challenges, thereby increasing the risk of project failure. In this setting, donor agency governance plays a critical role in managing project complexity. Existing research provides limited quantitative evidence on how ex ante environmental risks affect project success and rarely examines how donor agency governance operates in this relationship. To address these gaps, this study examines the relationship between potential environmental impact, donor agency governance, and project success in World Bank-financed AEC projects. Using World Bank project data combined with country-level data sets, we estimate OLS and Logit models on a sample of 1,419 AEC projects across 151 countries. The findings reveal the following: (1) higher potential environmental impact is significantly associated with lower project success; (2) donor agency governance at both preparation and implementation stages improves project success; and (3) implementation-stage governance, rather than preparation-stage governance, plays a dominant role in mitigating the negative effects of potential environmental impact. This study provides large-scale quantitative evidence on the link between potential environmental impact and project success, extends project governance research by revealing the mechanisms of donor agency governance, and introduces project-level governance discourse into the international development literature. The findings also offer practical implications for donors, borrowers, and project organizations.

As urbanization accelerates and population structures change, healthcare buildings are becoming increasingly crowded. Predicting functional area demand is crucial to adapting to this trend and providing high-quality services. This paper introduces an innovative multi-stage method to forecast unbuilt projects using operational data from hospital information systems and building design models to automatically calculate spatial demands. The study’s main findings demonstrate that our method successfully outputs regional demand data, supporting hospital design validation and operational decision-making. Through processing and analyzing log data, this research identified the dynamic characteristics of user activities in hospital buildings and converted them into a time series data format. This method has iterative self-validation and self-optimization features and can maintain flexibility in different scenarios and frequently changing design drawings. This method will provide technical support for a wide range of hospital building stakeholders and has the potential to be applied to more types of buildings. These findings will contribute to various fields, including medical facility planning, design, and public health.

Megaprojects need to consider a broader set of stakeholders, including external stakeholders. Although this dyadic relationship between the project organization and stakeholders has been widely adopted and is used in stakeholder management studies, the number of studies that incorporate a network view on stakeholders is considerably lower. The quantitative barriers create measurement challenges in understanding the dynamics of relationships among stakeholders in a broader network. To have sufficient observations to conduct empirical studies, one must map the structure of relationships among a large number of relationships among broader stakeholders and assess the level of conflict or cooperation of those ties. In this paper, we propose a method to generate a set of quantitative measures about the structure of relationships among stakeholders and megaprojects. We utilize English-language media articles stored in the Dow Jones Factiva database and apply natural language processing techniques to identify their stakeholders of them and construct a panel dataset of relationships among them. Drawing from methods to analyze social networks, we also construct an undirected graph to describe the stakeholder network of given megaprojects.

Scholars and practitioners have attached great importance to the integration of sustainability into project management. However, less relevant research has been conducted in the context of international engineering projects. The highly volatile and competitive international market environment brings great challenges to the sustainable delivery of international engineering projects and therefore always threatens the survival of international contractors. This study aimed to investigate the critical dynamic capabilities that facilitate the sustainable delivery of international engineering projects. Based on content analysis of 45 international engineering project cases, 5 dynamic capabilities were first identified, including project threat sensing, cross-cultural project team integration, stakeholder integration, exploitation-centered reconfiguration, and exploration-centered reconfiguration. Then, a crisp-set qualitative comparative analysis was adopted to explore the configurational effects of the above dynamic capabilities on three dimensions of sustainable delivery, i.e., economic, environmental, and social sustainability. The main findings reveal several configurations of dynamic capabilities for international engineering projects in achieving sustainable delivery of economic, environmental, and social dimensions. This study enriches the research on sustainable project delivery from the perspective of dynamic capability theory and provides insights for global contractors into how to deploy dynamic capabilities in the international contracting market to achieve sustainable delivery of international engineering projects.

Based on the Foucauldian concept of governmentality, this paper overcomes the atomistic view of external stakeholder engagement research to examine the specific conditions under which community engagement in urban infrastructure public-private partnerships (PPPs) can be transformational and create social value with and for communities. In particular, it shows that a transformational approach to community engagement is, in practice, closer to a form of governance that emphasizes involved stakeholders’ responsibility. It traces this line of argument through the literature and practice of social enterprises and other hybrid collaborations in the private sector. Conceptually, it contributes to a political and transformational understanding of community engagement within the context of public-private partnerships. First, by proposing a “governmentality analytical framework” for understanding and uncovering the often purposefully concealed dynamic power relations in the engagement process between the state, communities, and private investors. Second, by proposing a set of guiding principles on how to: empower communities to be organized; reconfigure the institutional environment to offer incentives and reliability; and design public-private partnerships as hybrid organizations capable of including other actors, such as non-governmental organizations.

As the scale and complexity of capital projects continue to increase, so do collaboration requirements among owners, engineers, architects, contractors, and other stakeholders in the project lifecycle. These organizational network challenges can impede successful project delivery. Innovation is a key factor in executing complex projects that require expertise from each party in a collaboration network. Unlike in many other industries, collaborations in architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) project networks are typically temporary and require periods of intense collaboration. In an effort to understand the characteristics and evolutionary paths of innovative collaboration networks in the AEC industry, the authors collected data on more than 200 projects over a 15-year period (2000–2014) that were awarded the State Science and Technology Advancement Prize (SSTAP) of China and examine each of these as innovation collaboration cases. Social network analysis (SNA) techniques are used to understand the network characteristics and to examine the evolutionary patterns over time. The results find the studied innovative collaboration networks to be large and interwoven. Universities, with significantly greater betweenness centralities, serve as key network nodes in spreading creativity and promoting practical–theoretical integrations. This study also reveals that fewer repeated collaborations lead to more innovativeness. In other words, repeated collaborations may have a negative impact on novel and challenging AEC projects. Understanding such characteristics could promote innovations in the AEC industry and aid in the selection of strategic partners to participate in the execution of large and complex AEC projects more efficiently and effectively.