Drivers and Barriers in Shaping Resilience Projects: An Investigation in the Space Economy

Projects as a temporal form of organizing are crucial in enhancing society’s and the environment’s resilience. Despite the growing empirical relevance of this phenomenon, existing literature underinvestigated how these “resilience projects” are shaped to enhance society and the environment’s resilience. To this end, our article answers: “What are the drivers and barriers in shaping resilience projects?” We performed 38 interviews with managers of resilience projects developed in the European Space Economy, triangulated with secondary data. We leverage resilience projects and project-shaping theoretical bodies to sensemake our findings. We identified three drivers: 1) Thriving with the institutional context to cope with disturbances, 2) Unveiling collective knowledge to envision the future, 3) Future-proofing the intervention to embrace disturbances), and two barriers: 1) Navigating divergent time horizons, 2) Dealing with multiple futures, that affect the shaping of “resilience projects.” We identified 13 practices managers adopt to deal with such drivers and barriers. Our study extends the resilience project’s theoretical knowledge by empirically demonstrating that holism, materiality, and prospectivity explain the shaping phase. We challenge mainstream project-shaping literature rooted in rationalist paradigms, highlighting the value of future-oriented practices. We extend the “projects of future” debate by introducing the barrier of dealing with multiple futures.