The Temporality of Project Success: Vindeby, the World’s First Offshore Wind Farm

Abstract

This article advances a temporal understanding of project success through a process study of Vindeby, an exploratory project developing the world’s first offshore wind farm. Pursuing a situated temporal view, our findings reveal how actors constructed Vindeby’s success differently when seeing the project as future, present, and past and how these constructions mutually shaped each other. Adding to prior literature adopting an over-time or in-time perspective, we develop a through-time perspective of project success and a model explaining the interplay of the three perspectives. We discuss how projects may serve as temporal stepping stones toward sustainable futures in the green transition and propose ways for project managers and policymakers to nurture this potential.