How spatial and temporal tensions influence environmental coordinators’ boundary-spanning roles in infrastructure projects

Other conference contribution, 2026

Despite being key actors in the transition toward more sustainable futures, sustainability professionals, such as environmental coordinators, often face unclear responsibilities and ambiguous work expectations, which may hinder their ability to drive transitional sustainability change. This paper contributes to research on sustainability and project organizing by focusing on the everyday work of environmental coordinators. More specifically, the aim of this paper is to examine how spatial and temporal tensions among project actors shape the boundary-spanning role of environmental coordinators in a large infrastructure project. Drawing on a case study design including document studies, 20 semi-structured interviews and 80 hours of observations conducted in a large Swedish infrastructure project, the study analyses how project actors invest different meanings and activities into their use of space and time. The findings reveal how spatial and temporal tensions arise from different perceptions among the production staff and the construction client: namely space as a resource versus space as regulated respectively time as in flux versus time as fixed—tensions which the environmental coordinators must continuously bridge, negotiate and navigate between. By highlighting the spatial and temporal dimensions of environmental work in infrastructure projects, this study contributes to the literature on time, space, and boundary spanning in project management and provides new insights into the conditions under which environmental coordinators operate in environmentally complex projects. This study demonstrates that the varying expectations for environmental coordinators’ role are based more on the differing spatial and temporal perspectives of project participants than on the belief that they find sustainability work as unimportant.