Abstract
The United Nations’ (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) aim to deliver an improved future for people, planet and profit. However, they have not gained the required traction at the business and project levels. This article explores how engineers rate and use the SDGs at the organisational and project levels. It adopts the Realist Evaluation’s Context–Mechanism–Outcomes model to critically evaluate practitioners’ views on using SDGs to measure business and project success. The study addresses the thematic areas of sustainability and business models through the theoretical lens of Creating Shared Value and the Triple Bottom Line. A survey of 325 engineers indicated four primary shortfalls for measuring SDGs on infrastructure projects, namely (1) leadership, (2) tools and methods, (3) engineers’ business skills in measuring SDG impact and (4) how project success is too narrowly defined as outputs (such as time, cost and scope) and not outcomes (longer-term local impacts and stakeholder value). The research study is of value to researchers developing business models that address the SDGs and also practitioners in the construction industry who seek to link their investment decisions to the broader outcomes of people, planet and profit through the UN SDGs.
Highlights
In 2015, the international community responded to the sustainable development challenge with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for 2030 in their report ‘Transforming Our World: The 2030Agenda For Sustainable Development’ (United Nations 2015)
The debate on businesses’ responsibility to ‘give back’ to society and the environment have evolved from earlier notions associated with corporate social responsibility (CSR) agenda, and these in turn have been influenced by the notion of creating shared value (CSV), which seeks to change the way in which business creates value for its stakeholders (Porter and Kramer 2011), i.e., through placing socially aware priorities, such as the SDGs, at the heart of core business’ thinking and strategies
An online is used as rate the and firstuse part of a address thegoals earlier research question: engineers in the survey construction sector global mixed methods approach that provides a triangulation (Creswell and of data (i.e., United Nations’ (UN) SDG goals for businesses and projects at local level? An online survey is used as the first part of a mixed through approach literature that review, surveya and interviews) to inform theCreswell development methods provides triangulation
Summary
In 2015, the international community responded to the sustainable development challenge with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for 2030 in their report ‘Transforming Our World: The 2030. The contribution of this article is to harness the results of a large-scale survey on how engineers employ the SDG performance framework at the project level to examine the ‘contextual’ strengths and weaknesses of utilizing the SDG measuring ‘mechanism’ This provides deep insights for academics and practitioners to improve their understanding of how the SDGs can provide increased impact at the local level. After only five years, the global commitment to deliver meaningful SDG action is falling behind on ambitions at both the local and global levels (Office of National Statistics 2019) This is relevant for project managers because much of tomorrow’s resilience and development will be delivered by the project management community, across all sectors, but especially infrastructure. The final section concludes the paper with proposals for how this research can inform the development of a new model for measurement of SDGs and recommends areas for further studies based on the proposed research framework
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