Rolling the Boulder Uphill: Project Management Actors Emerging as Institutional Entrepreneurs to Advance Sustainability in Defense Projects

The defense sector represents a signi􀏐icant portion of public spending
and contributes substantially to domestic consumption and emissions. Despite
this, it has often been exempt from environmental regulations applied to other
public sector activities. This study investigates the role of project management
actors in integrating sustainability into major defense materiel and infrastructure
projects in Norway. Using Institutional Entrepreneurship Theory (IET) as a
theoretical framework, we explore the actions taken by individual actors to initiate
institutional change and integrate sustainability into defense projects, and ask the
following research question: What practices are used by individual actors to drive
change and integrate sustainability in project management? Through semistructured
interviews with 24 key project management actors, we found that the
defense sector is in the early stages of adopting sustainable practices, with
traditional project management methods predominating; inspired by IET as our
analytical device, we found actors use their agency in an highly institutionalized
context, and engage in two key practices to enable the processes of ‘sustainable
change’ in the studied defense projects. These practices include Contextualizing
and Promoting Change. Our 􀏐indings contribute to the body of knowledge on
sustainable project management by providing empirical evidence of how project
management actors work to incorporate sustainability within the military context,
an arguably underexplored project setting. Additionally, the 􀏐indings enrich
project management literature by demonstrating the bene􀏐its of using IET as a
valuable analytical framework. Furthermore, the study’s 􀏐indings contribute to the
broader discussion on IET.