Rethinking project governance: Incorporating contextual and practice-based views

Abstract

While project governance research is burgeoning, the prevalence of a structural focus and project business perspective may impede the understanding of governing practices and contextual interaction. Therefore, we adopt a multidisciplinary systematic review and begin by scrutinizing the main topics, theories, and methodologies of project governance research. Then, and most importantly, we elaborate a comprehensive framework with four alternative archetypes: organizational project governance, organizational project governing, institutional project governance, and institutional project governing. These four archetypes extend previous views and clarify the underlying commonalities and differences among different project governance studies. Moreover, we identify the practice turn and contextual turn as two promising shifts for conceptualizing the governance phenomenon as an ongoing process interacting with a broader societal context. Our findings will not only help scholars to recognize the lived experience and situated contexts of governing practices, but also encourage them to generate dialogs across different archetypes and the theory-practice gap.