Perspectives · Governance & Capability

The Project Is the Wrong Unit of Value and Sustainability Keeps Paying for It

In a recent interview with Sustainability Magazine, Lucila Dotto, PMI's Global Head of Sustainability, made a claim I agree with and want to extend. She said that ambition is no longer the primary constraint, that most large organisations already hold commitments and targets, and that the difficulty now sits in execution. Her closing line was the sharpest part of the piece: sustainability becomes real when it changes a decision.¹

The question that follows is why it so often does not change one. The usual explanations point at conviction, culture, or maturity. Those matter, and they are downstream. The mechanical reason is that most organisations price sustainability against the wrong unit of value, and once the unit is wrong the arithmetic produces the same answer no matter how committed the people running it are.

Three horizons, one business case

Look at what an organisation actually governs. A project runs for weeks or months, occasionally a few years. The asset that project creates runs for decades. The institution making the commitment is working to a horizon of twenty to fifty years, which is where its net zero target, its resilience commitment, and its regulatory exposure all sit.

Three horizons, and governance almost always attaches to the shortest one. The business case is scoped to delivery. The approval gate is scoped to delivery. The success criteria close at handover, the project team disbands, and the record of what was promised goes into a repository that nobody reopens. A sustainability commitment that matures over the asset's operating life is being tested inside a frame that ends before the value arrives.

Dotto describes projects as investment decisions about the future. That is accurate, and it is also the point of failure. An investment decision is only as good as the period it is evaluated over. Price a forty-year asset against a nine-month delivery window and the long-term case loses on the numbers every time, correctly, given the numbers being used.

PMI surveyed close to 1,600 project professionals across 35 countries this year, and the result is a confidence gradient rather than a single figure. Eighty-five percent of sustainability executives are confident the goals will be reached. Forty-three percent of PMO leaders share that confidence. Twenty percent of project professionals are extremely confident. Forty-two points separate the people who set the strategy from the people who deliver it.

That gradient tracks proximity to the business case. It is easy to read it as skepticism thinning out the further you get from leadership. The more useful reading is that confidence falls as people get closer to the point where the commitment has to survive a funding decision, because that is where the unit mismatch becomes visible. Fifty-eight percent say sustainability costs more. Thirty-six percent describe it as a burden. Forty-four percent see measurable impact at project level. Those are not attitudes to be corrected through communication. They are accurate readings of what the current arithmetic returns.

What a corrected unit looks like

Moving the unit of value from the project to the operating asset changes four things, and each one is a specific piece of governance rather than a change in outlook.

Thresholds instead of ratings

I use a central bank example when I teach this, because the discipline is already familiar in those rooms. A central bank does not steer financial stability with one blended score. It uses capital adequacy requirements, reserve levels, and inflation targets: specific thresholds, individually measured, individually breached. Project sustainability works the same way. A composite ESG rating cannot carry a project, because delivery runs on limits that can be tested. Define the material thresholds the asset must hold, measure against them through delivery, and keep measuring them after handover.

A register that outlives the project

If the asset is the unit of value, the threshold register has to survive project closure and transfer to whoever operates the asset. This is the single most commonly skipped step. Organisations set sustainability criteria at approval, deliver against them, close the project, and lose the criteria at the handover boundary. The asset then runs for thirty years with nobody holding the commitments that justified building it.

Impact assessed before the business case, not after

The P5 Standard for Sustainability in Project Management exists to carry this through the lifecycle in sequence: impact analysis, then business case and charter, then a sustainability management plan, then the threshold register, then benefit realisation. Each stage hands the next a measurable commitment. The sequence matters more than any single artifact, because an impact analysis performed after the funding decision has no decision left to inform. Dotto makes the same point about moving sustainability upstream into the choices that determine what gets funded and how success is defined. The P5 lifecycle is one way to make that sequence structural rather than dependent on who happens to be in the room.

Procurement written to the same thresholds

Most of an organisation's sustainability exposure is bought rather than built. Carbon footprint across the supply chain, labour conditions across the vendor base, provenance and traceability of materials. If those criteria are written into vendor selection and then into the contract, they are enforceable for the life of the agreement. If they live in a policy document, they are advisory. The distance between those two outcomes is a paragraph of contract language and someone with the standing to insist on it.

A policy does not embed itself

Every correction above is work performed by a person. Someone has to convert a net zero commitment into a threshold that belongs in a charter. Someone has to write a supply chain criterion that a procurement officer can score and a vendor can be held to. Someone has to build a benefit register in a form that the operations team will still be using in year twelve. That is specific technical work with a defined method behind it, and organisations have consistently underinvested in the capability to do it while investing heavily in the ambition that requires it.

The same PMI research indicates that around a fifth of project professionals are currently equipped to deliver sustainability outcomes, and that 59 percent of organisations are building this capability into their bench. The second number is the more interesting one. It says the demand side has already recognised the gap and is moving, which puts the constraint on supply and on whether that capability can be verified rather than asserted.

This is why the Certified Sustainable Project Professional certification exists in the form it does. CSPP assesses threshold competence in the specific tasks named above: impact analysis against the P5 domains, translating enterprise commitments into project requirements, building sustainability management plans, setting and monitoring thresholds, writing procurement criteria that hold, and tracking benefits past handover. It is deliberately narrow. It does not certify sustainability knowledge in general, and it does not replace delivery certifications such as the PMP. It answers a single question that a portfolio leader needs answered before assigning someone to a project carrying a long-horizon commitment.

There is a second constraint that competence alone does not resolve. Dotto names it directly when she says project professionals may understand what should change while lacking the mandate, information, or decision rights to challenge established assumptions. A CSPP holder who identifies that a project's justification has eroded still needs someone above them with the authority to act on it. That is the sponsor's function, and it is why capability and governance have to arrive together. Certifying the practitioner without defining the decision rights above them produces a well-equipped person with nowhere to send a finding.

The diagnostic

Two conditions determine whether a sustainability commitment survives contact with delivery: whether the strategic direction is clear at project level, and whether the structures around the project reinforce it. Those two conditions produce four states, and most organisations can locate themselves in one of them without much difficulty.

Where direction is clear and structures are constrained, the result is frustrated value erosion: capable teams who know what the organisation is trying to do and cannot get it through the gate. Where structures are strong and direction is diffuse, the result is confident misdirection, which is the more expensive failure because it looks like progress in every report. Where both are missing, there is value blindness, and the commitments exist only in the annual report. Where both hold, decisions change, which is the condition Dotto describes as sustainability becoming real.

The correction available to most organisations is narrower than the diagnosis suggests. Name the operating asset as the unit of value in the business case template. Define thresholds instead of scores. Move the impact analysis in front of the funding decision. Carry the register past handover. Write the criteria into procurement. Then staff the work with people who have been assessed against a standard for doing it, and give them a sponsor with the authority to act on what they find. None of that requires a new commitment. It requires the existing commitment to be measured over the period it was actually made for.

¹ Williment, C. "PMI Q&A: Leading Sustainability Ambition for Business Impact." Sustainability Magazine, September 1, 2026. Interview with Lucila Dotto, Global Head of Sustainability and PMI-GPM Executive Director, PMI.

² PMI global sustainability survey, 2026. Nearly 1,600 project professionals across 35 countries.

³ The P5™ Standard for Sustainability in Project Management, PMI and GPM Global.