What is a sustainable construction project?

<p dir="ltr"><i>To contribute to sustainability, or even to merely “be” sustainable, the built environment needs to deliver change and change the way that it delivers. The making of the built environment is dominated by the paradigm of construction project management. These projects change ‘stuff’ but also control and constrain change . This is a working paper in which we seek to develop a theoretical approach to understanding construction projects, change and sustainability. We adopt an interpretative methodology to create a bricolage built from our reflections on three collaborative episodes of making sense of sustainability in the built environment.</i><i> </i><i>Starting with the question “what is a sustainable construction project?” we interpret our experiences using research on system change to widen our analysis beyond the planning and control of asset delivery. Among other levers, that will be the subject of future research, we identify the need for a shift from the language of sustainable ‘construction projects’ to ‘sustainable construction’ projects. Our reflections are a set of steps towards locating such projects within a socio-technical transition system of sufficient reach and scope to address the sustainability challenges we face.</i></p>