​Project Delivery Systems for Sustainable Civil Infrastructure: Systemic transformation to achieve Low-Carbon, Circularity, and Resiliency goals

Submit your paper here from 10 February 2026! 

Introduction  

​​Civil infrastructure systems are facing unprecedented pressures arising from climate change, resource scarcity, accelerating urbanization, and growing societal expectations for sustainability, resilience, and accountability. While significant advances have been made in carbon reduction technologies, circular economy practices, and resilience-oriented design, less attention has been paid to the project delivery systems through which these sustainability objectives are governed, negotiated, and realized in practice. Fragmented and transactional delivery approaches often struggle to reconcile competing objectives related to cost, schedule, carbon performance, lifecycle value, and long-term resilience, particularly in large-scale public infrastructure projects.

This special issue argues that sustainable infrastructure outcomes cannot be achieved through isolated technical interventions alone, but instead depend on the institutional, contractual, and organizational structures that shape decision-making across the project lifecycle. Drawing on a quadruple nexus perspective, carbon, circularity, resilience, and collaborative contracting, the special issue seeks to advance understanding of how project delivery systems enable or constrain sustainability transitions in civil infrastructure.

The issue invites interdisciplinary contributions that examine sustainability not only as an outcome, but as a governance and delivery challenge, influenced by delivery models, new business models, data and digitalization, risk allocation, and stakeholder collaboration. Particular attention is given to civil infrastructure contexts, including transportation, water, energy, and social infrastructure, where long asset lifespans, public ownership, regulatory oversight, and societal impacts intensify the importance of delivery system design.

By integrating perspectives from engineering management, project management, construction management, operations, and public-sector governance, this special issue aims to provide theoretically grounded and empirically rich insights into how sustainable project delivery systems can be designed, scaled, and institutionalized. Contributions may adopt qualitative, quantitative, mixed-methods, or modeling and simulation approaches, and may address projects, programs, portfolios, or infrastructure systems more broadly. The special issue seeks to inform both scholarly debate and practical decision-making for owners, policymakers, and industry leaders responsible for delivering sustainable civil infrastructure.​

List of Topic Areas

Theme A: Carbon Governance, Circularity, and Lifecycle Value Creation 
-Carbon governance frameworks, carbon budgeting, and accountability mechanisms 
-Embodied vs. operational carbon trade-offs across the infrastructure lifecycle 
-Integration of carbon and circularity objectives into planning, procurement, and delivery 
-Lifecycle thinking and value creation (planning-construction-operation-decommissioning) 
-Circular economy implementation, including resource stewardship and material recovery 
-Business model innovation for circular and low-carbon infrastructure 
-Lifecycle cost and value trade-offs  

Theme B: Resilience, Risk Governance, and Adaptive Infrastructure Systems 
-Resilience-oriented governance and delivery approaches 
-Risk allocation, contingency management, and escalation mechanisms 
-Adaptive capacity under climate change, uncertainty, and extreme events 
-Integration of resilience objectives into project, program, and portfolio decisions 
-Organizational learning, feedback loops, and continuous adaptation 
-Long-term infrastructure robustness, reliability, and shock absorption 

Theme C: Digitalized and Industrialized Construction  
-Digitalization and data-driven decision supports 
-AI-enabled planning, simulation, and performance modeling 
-Digital twins for sustainability, resilience, and asset performance management 
-Industrialized construction, offsite production, and automation 
-Design-for-Excellence (DfX) approaches, including DfMA and related design strategies 
-Automation-enabled monitoring of sustainability, productivity, and risk performance 

Theme D: Collaborative Governance, Delivery Models, and Systemic Transformation 
-Collaborative delivery models 
-Governance of transparency, shared accountability, and data stewardship 
-Alignment of incentives, decision rights, and information flows 
-Policy and regulatory drivers of delivery-system transformation 
-Diffusion and scaling of sustainable delivery practices across portfolios 
-Cross-sector, comparative, and longitudinal analyses of infrastructure delivery systems 
-Institutionalization of sustainability-oriented infrastructure transitions 
 

Submissions Information

Submissions are made using ScholarOne Manuscripts. Registration and access are available at:  ​https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ecaam 
Author guidelines must be strictly followed. Please see: ​https://www.emeraldgrouppublishing.com/journal/ecam#jlp_author_guidelines
Authors should select (from the drop-down menu) the special issue title at the appropriate step in the submission process, i.e. in response to “Please select the issue you are submitting to”.  
Submitted articles must not have been previously published, nor should they be under consideration for publication anywhere else, while under review for this journal.

Key Deadlines

Closing date for manuscripts submission: ​30/08/2026