Last few years have seen a huge increase of publications at the intersection of project management and sustainability. Nevertheless, this field has become increasingly fragmented undermining a steady and consistent development. Aiming at balancing tensions between authors’ attempts for more ‘integration’ and the trajectories toward fragmentation, we employed an extensive, systematic literature review of 770 publications from the period 1993 to 2017. Therefore, this review offers guidance to scholars less familiar with this concept who encounter SPM in their research. We suggest that the SPM literature can be understood by answering the following questions: (1) Why adopt sustainable business practices into projects? (2) What is the impact of sustainability on traditional project management practices? And (3) how is sustainability embedded in project practices? The three narrative themes illustrate the diverse views on the different aspects of SPM, allowing divergences, such as different philosophical underpinnings or levels of analysis, to flourish without eroding the clarity of the field.

Introduction

Looking at policy makers’ agendas, strategic investment decisions within large corporations or professional codes of ethics, it is impossible not to notice a growing attention for the concept of ‘sustainability’. In the words of Gladwin et al. (1995) the transformation of “management theory and practice so that they positively contribute to sustainable development is […] the greatest challenge facing the Academy of Management” (p. 900). In parallel with this, the identification of a trend toward the ‘projectification’ of society society (Case and Piñeiro, 2009; Cicmil and Hodgson, 2006; Ekstedt, 2009; Lundin and Midler, 1998; Lundin and Söderholm, 1998), whereby economic activity is increasingly driven through projects, has drawn attention to (and consequently developed) the discipline of project management (PM). In this context, it is not surprising that PM is becoming increasingly important vehicle for implementing sustainability (Kivilä et al., 2017).