The Monitoring and the Reporting of Social, Environmental and Economic Impacts of Megaprojects

Dear Colleagues,

The scope of this Special Issue is to shed light on the monitoring of social and economic impacts linked to a megaproject that is a topic mainly explored by project management literature (Winch 2017). Holistic and multidisciplinary studies on megaprojects’ social responsibility are rare as scholars have mostly explored that topic using a single perspective (Lin et al. 2017; Ma et al. 2017). For instance, while sociologists have deeply investigated the not in my backyard (NIMBY) movement, environmental economists and engineers have worked more on the evaluation of environmental impacts, while medical scientists have investigated the impact of health and safety for the population following a megaproject construction. 

On a practical level, the planning, monitoring, and measurement of social, economic, and environmental impact is a relatively underexplored research field both in terms of process and results achieved. Legal constraints and regulations could greatly vary, especially using geographical criteria, and the management of social, economic, and environmental impacts strictly depends on the nature of the business (private companies, public initiatives, or public–private initiatives).  

Quire recently, the launch of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by the United Nations has shed light on the topic of sustainable infrastructure, defined as building resilient infrastructure, promoting inclusive and sustainable industrialization, and fostering innovation (World Business Council for Sustainable Development Urban 2014). Consequently, the concept of sustainable development applied to megaprojects has been hyped in the activity of designing, planning, and properly mapping those risks that have a high probability of being turned into impacts in the long run.

As clarified before, norms to manage the impacts on the ecological environment and people’s health are well established in some geographical context, but they can significantly vary in the same regions and countries. Additionally, managing economic and social impacts, theory, and practices is mostly based on proactive approaches (Littau et al. 2015), and companies tend to disclose their data using their private communication channels, while internal processes and strategies are not usually publicly disclosed. 

Considering that megaprojects have different peculiarities (some of them are structural, others are organizational or geographical), the rationale of this Special Issue is to collect studies that can serve as a theoretical advancement and a possible guide for practitioners involved in megaprojects.

Topics that should be further investigated could be (but are not limited to):

• Multidisciplinary studies on megaprojects’ impacts on societies, environment, and economic systems;
• Case studies on the design, execution, and monitoring of social, economic, and environmental impacts of megaprojects;
• Critical issues and ethical dilemma of megaprojects’ social responsibility, time constraints, budgets, usefulness, corruption, bribery, mafia, etc.;
• Interdisciplinary approaches and innovative methodological implication for the study of megaprojects’ social responsibility;
• Contribution of a specific discipline concerning or in a union with other disciplines for a social, environmental, and economic impact of megaprojects;
• SDG implications for the design and assessment of a megaproject;
• Governance implications of megaprojects about international standards and movements supporting sustainable development;
• Sustainability of unsustainable megaprojects (by definition);
• Taxonomies of megaprojects and related social, environmental, and economic concerns.

References

Lin, Han, Saixing Zeng, Hanyang Ma, Ruochen Zeng, and Vivian W.Y. Tam. 2017. “An Indicator System for Evaluating Megaproject Social Responsibility.” International Journal of Project Management 35 (7): 1415–26. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijproman.2017.04.009.

Littau, Paul, Ivana Burcar Dunović, Louis-Francois Pau, Mauro Mancini, Ana Irimia Dieguez, Carmen Medina-Lopez, Konrad Spang, Agnese Travaglini, Raffaello Colombo, and Maja-Marija Nahod. 2015. “Managing Stakeholders in Megaprojects-The MS Working Group Report.”

Ma, Hanyang, Saixing Zeng, Han Lin, Hongquan Chen, and Jonathan J. Shi. 2017. “The Societal Governance of Megaproject Social Responsibility.” International Journal of Project Management 35 (7): 1365–77. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijproman.2017.01.012.

Winch, Graham M. 2017. “Oxford Handbooks Online Megaproject Stakeholder Management,” no. November: 1–27. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198732242.013.14.

World Business Council for Sustainable Development Urban, WBCSD. 2014. The Urban Infrastructure Initiative. Pureprint.

Prof. Laura Corazza
Prof. Giuseppe Tipaldo
Dr. Daniel Torchia
Guest Editors

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• megaprojects
• megaproject social responsibility
• social impact of megaproject
• social accounting in megaprojects
• environmental impact
• economic impact
• sustainability of megaprojects
• sustainable infrastructures