Projects as interventions

The project scholarship community needs to revisit how it conceptualizes a ‘project’ to understand it as an intervention into nature: intervening in both existing situations and uncertain futures. Taking a post-rationalistic approach to the future, in this essay we set out how we conceive of projects as interventions, and the important implications of this for practice and scholarship. While there are promising recent developments, there is also an urgency to further shift the mindset away from conceiving of projects as solely a social or technological endeavour, with success measured in terms of cost, quality and schedule; toward a broader outcome focus, with concern for both the natural resources used and the positive and negative impacts on places and people across time. This has implications for the skills needed by practitioners and their training, for the kind of projects that are conceived and delivered, and for our scholarship community and its agendas for further research.