Sustainability as a Strategic Axis of Value Creation in Modern Project Management: A Systematic Bibliometric and Meta-Aggregative Review

Abstract

Sustainability has evolved from a peripheral concern to a core dimension of contemporary project management. This study characterizes and synthesizes scholarly production at the intersection of sustainability and project management from 2000 to 2025, with particular attention to the tension between global knowledge production and the contextual needs of Latin America and other emerging markets. A sequential, integrative review design combined bibliometric analysis—used to map the field’s structure, evolution, and relational configuration—with a meta-aggregative synthesis, informed by Joanna Briggs Institute principles, of explicit findings from a final corpus of 37 highly relevant articles. The analysis clarifies the theoretical foundations of the organizational perspective on project management and its connections with value creation, sustainable project management, technological innovation, the circular economy, resilience, leadership, change management, and risk management. The results reveal pronounced geographical asymmetry: China and the United States lead scholarly production, whereas research in Latin American remains fragmented and predominantly technical. The findings further indicate that sustainability is increasingly understood as an emergent property of socio-technical systems oriented toward multidimensional value creation. Sustainable project management therefore requires a shift from operational efficiency alone toward organizational transformation, stakeholder legitimacy, public policy alignment, and long-term resilience.