The transport sector accounts for a large share of global Co2 emissions. To mitigate the impact of climate change, several sustainability-oriented large-scale infrastructure projects such as electric road systems and expanding rail systems have recently been on the policy agenda. A parallel development that is expected to accelerate the transition of the transport sector is digitalization, which, although ongoing for many decades, has recently been augmented by concepts such as artificial intelligence (AI) and smart city technologies. The integration of these digitalization tools at the organizational level poses not only opportunities but also some challenges for the actors involved in infrastructure projects. An approach that is currently promoted in the infrastructure sector is the Building Information Model (BIM), which is a decision-making instrument that leverages various digitalization tools and applications. However, although the economic implications of BIM are widely discussed in the literature, the (inter-) organizational dynamics involving multiple actors in infrastructure projects are not fully grasped. Large infrastructure projects are sociotechnical endeavors embedded in complex institutional frames; hence the institutional norms, practices and logics in them are significant. Responding to this, this paper adopted an institutional analysis and put the BIM approach in the (inter-) organizational context in infrastructure delivery. Drawing on empirical data from three organizations in infrastructure delivery in Spain, this paper analyzed the tensions among actors during BIM adoption and implementation.

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Despite wide-ranging research on large-scale infrastructure project performance, little is known about the role that project public institutional context and project owner's response capability plays in the governing process. Building on a theoretically driven approach and a case study, we first established a set of propositions, and then substantiated this set through empirical illustrations. This study investigated the multi-actor Madrid-Barcelona high-speed rail line (HSL) project with the use of social network analysis supplemented by qualitative evidence. The findings show that actors' behavior is affected by the project public institutional context, coupled with contractual commitments. A closer examination of the data found two factors that drive the escalation dynamics: (1) the timing mismatches-a ubiquitous feature of public sector project owners' organization-leading to the incapacity to influence governance during the project front-end and (2) owners' passive behavior during implementation. From the management perspective, an active owner with high project response capability is necessary for effectively interacting with contractors, and for selecting and managing both contractual and trust-based governance mechanisms effectively. Based on the findings, the authors offer theoretical and managerial implications for promoting the effectiveness of owner-contractor collaboration in large-scale infrastructure projects.