‘Call to Arms’: Using the Creating Shared Value Business Governance Paradigm to Deliver Projects’ Business-Society Impact Against the UN SDG 2030 Targets
This paper aims to bring to the forefront the need for projects to be aligned with SDGs. The paper builds on the governance literature and navigates from the dominant ‘Corporate Social Responsibility’ (CSR) idea to ‘Creating Shared Value’ (CSV). This literature moves towards a synergy between achieving economic business success on projects (including financial objectives) and wider benefits to society and the environment. It provides an empirical lens which is wide enough to capture instances of impact that are relevant to SDGs. The use of this ‘triple bottom line’ - economy, society, environment - can link SDGs to normative project success criteria. The paper uses empirical evidence from the survey of 325 engineering project managers to highlight a current gap in measuring the United Nations’ (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) at project level. The analysis of the survey results showed that the linking of infrastructure project success to SDG targets is problematic; while the appetite for action is very strong, especially by millennials (results: 87% of engineering project managers want to measure projects’ SDG impact), only a third believe they have ‘tools fit for purpose’, which suggests that – at the bottom line – the UN SDGs are hard to materialise and take forward in impactful, transformative ways. The survey results indicated four primary shortfalls: in the tools and methods available; the leadership and decisions-making; the engineers’ business skills in defining and measuring SDG impact; and, how project success is defined at the corporate level in terms of narrowly-defined project outputs (such as time, cost and scope) and not outcomes (longer-term local impacts and stakeholder value)
