Integrating Sustainability into Major Infrastructure Projects: Four Perspectives on Sustainable Tunnel Development

Abstract

Although sustainability is on the agenda of many countries and agencies, it is still a great challenge to properly integrate sustainability into major infrastructure projects, like tunnels. This is remarkable, as it is commonly accepted that the construction and operation of these civil infrastructures have a heavy impact on environmental, economic and social sustainability. In academia, the foregone conclusion seems to point to a lack of vision about sustainability with respect to tunnels. This article presents an empirical study that investigates sustainability ideas amongst tunnel practitioners in the Netherlands. The case was used as a practical environment to get access to tunnel practitioners, to explicitly define the meaning of a sustainable tunnel in its development phase. Perceptions of sustainable tunnels were extracted by means of a commonly accepted research methodology called Q-methodology. By applying this method, four perspectives were obtained: perspectives with a focus on energy, resilience, social or a transitional focus. Each perspective highlights distinct focal points on how to operationalize sustainability for tunnel projects. Each perspective is also accompanied by an anti-focus; how sustainability should not be approached, sometimes contrary to other perspectives. These insights help project practitioners in creating awareness for the existence of different perspectives, and subsequently help to focus project management efforts to implement sustainability in specific projects.

Stakeholders’ Attitudes about the Transplantations of the Mediterranean Seagrass Posidonia oceanica as a Habitat Restoration Measure after Anthropogenic Impacts: A Q Methodology Approach

“…The Q methodology provides an excellent help in this direction. For this reason, it has been applied often to analyze environmental governance in the field of nature conservation [21,[34][35][36], fisheries management [20,37], ecosystem services [28,29,38] and sustainability [33,39,40].…”

A TRIZ Approach to Reliable Megaproject Sustainability

“…The term "megaproject sustainability" (Chen, 2018) was put forward at the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE) in 2016 to promote research and practices in megaproject delivery with regard to sustainability considering STEEP issues. It has been further noticed that "project sustainability" (OED, 1988;Bamberger and Cheema, 1990;Morfaw, 2014;Martens and Carvalho, 2016;Aarseth et al, 2017;Khatiwada, 2017;Gijzel et al, 2020;Mansell et al, 2020) as a technical term has been introduced in the subject field of project management across industry sectors since the 1980s, and it has been widely explored on STEEP dimensions in the context of theoretical descriptions and case studies at various project stages. For megaproject, sustainability has also been recognized by leading practitioners (Suárez et al, 2012;Abadie, 2020) as an essential for capital project delivery.…”

Factors Affecting the Integration of Sustainability in the Early Project Phases in an Integrated Project Management Model

“…For developing a distinct sustainability success subcriteria list, recent literature is reviewed. Gijzel et al [20] developed a framework for sustainable aspects of a tunnel. We adopted this framework to identify sustainability success sub-criteria of a highway.…”