A research roadmap for megaproject sustainability assessment

The characteristics of sustainability within megaprojects (typically worth over $1bn each) can make gigantic impacts on the society, the economy, and the environment at local, regional, national, and even international level depending on the nature of the project in short and longer term, and the pursuit of megaproject sustainability in development and operation is to satisfy the need for a sufficient address on dynamically interactive issues relating to social, technical, economic, ecological and political (STEEP) aspects throughout project lifecycle. Therefore it’s an important but challenging task to do a reliable assessment on the overall sustainability of individual megaprojects to ensure the target is met in practice. This paper presents recent research findings about megaproject assessment on sustainability (MAS). The research has been conducted by using a new research method underpinned by TRIZ (Theory of Inventive Problem Solving) to facilitate the adoption of evidence-based learning (EBL) in further research into MAS. Findings from this TRIZ driven research include a knowledge framework, a research roadmap, and research tasks to support improved MAS in practice. It’s expected that this paper can be useful for research advancement towards reliable MAS to support decision making at work stages of megaprojects.