Roadway design and construction in infrastructure limited contexts: a risk breakdown structure

Abstract

The United Nation's sustainable development goals prioritize roadway development, as it is necessary for socio-economic prosperity. Despite rapid growth in the industry, progress has been crippled by budget and schedule overruns. There is often a lack of knowledge regarding risks that could impact project success. A content analysis of published research is performed to construct a preliminary risk identification and analysis framework—in the form of an initial risk breakdown structure (RBS) and codebook. They include 16 subcategories within the following six categories: ‘construction & planning’, ‘economic & financial’, ‘regulatory & legal’, ‘equipment, materials, & land’, ‘site disposition’, and ‘relations & recruitment’. This study provides researchers and project parties—including owners, contractors, consultants, and financial institutions—with a starting point to discuss and identify context-specific risks. It also suggests areas for future research.

Keywords:

• Risk
• road
• construction
• infrastructure
• development
• logistics performance index
• risk identification
• content analysis

Acknowledgements

This work was conducted at the University of Colorado Boulder and was supported by the K. Stanton Lewis endowment. We honour and acknowledge that the University is located on the land of the Ute, Cheyenne, and Arapaho peoples. Further, we acknowledge that 48 contemporary tribal nations are historically tied to the lands that make up the state of Colorado. We recognize the Indigenous peoples as the original stewards of the land, water, plants, and animals who called this place home. We also acknowledge the painful history of genocide and forced removal from this territory. We respect the many diverse Indigenous peoples still connected to this land on which this research was conducted. We pay our respect to them and give thanks to all Tribal Nations and the ancestors of this place.

We would also like to thank Suraj Gaikwad for his contribution to this study in his role as the SR.

Current and historical positionality statements for the first and second author can be found at https://dcbeardmore.com/positionality/ and https://www.colorado.edu/faculty/molenaar/, respectively.

Disclosure statement

The authors have no competing interests to report.