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Considering alternatives to megaprojects for a sustainable future with degrowth principles

2025· article· en· W4409261117 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

VenueInternational Journal of Project Management · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldDecision Sciences
TopicConstruction Project Management and Performance
Canadian institutionsHEC Montréal
Fundersnot available
KeywordsDegrowthEconomicsBusinessEngineeringSustainabilityEcologyBiology

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

• Despite our current climate challenge and natural resources depletion, megaprojects’ megalomania is on the rise. • ‘Sustainability without megaprojects’ is suggested, using a critical perspective and mobilizing the literature on degrowth. • Degrowth principles of producing less, sharing more and deciding together should orient future research, practice and policy responses. Given the increasing scholarly attention to megaprojects and sustainability, this essay proposes an alternative to building bigger and more megaprojects. Using a critical perspective and mobilizing the literature on degrowth, it is suggested that scaling down could be beneficial on many levels. Megaprojects are ubiquitous, yet they have profound repercussions on the land and resources and on local communities, not always for the better. Suggesting the avenue of ‘sustainability without megaprojects’, some research streams are suggested to pursue this reflection in line with degrowth principles of producing less, sharing more and deciding together. While more research is necessary to understand more thoroughly the implications of degrowth principles to megaprojects framing, there is also a crucial need for political action to debate the alternatives and develop appropriate policy responses.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.002
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.905
Threshold uncertainty score0.700

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0020.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0030.001
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0010.001
Open science0.0010.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.063
GPT teacher head0.401
Teacher spread0.338 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it