From three-pillars to three-environments: Shifting the paradigm of sustainability in civil and construction engineering

This research explores the usage of sustainability in literature and presents ‘three environments’ for addressing sustainability in the Civil and Construction Engineering (CCE) disciplines. Scholars have increasingly studied sustainability and sustainable development across CCE disciplines as the importance of sustainability awareness and action in society has increased. However, the vastness of its conceptual breadth and depth in CCE research is difficult to holistically evaluate. As a result, CCE researchers often focus on specific aspects of sustainability applied to discrete contexts, or address sustainability in broad aspirational terms and guiding motivations. This research utilized a rigorous analytical corpus linguistics approach for investigating CCE-based research published between 1989 and 2021 to capture a full view of the academic discourse surrounding sustainability in CCE. The research employed collocational network analysis to enable an expansive and comprehensive study of the concept of sustainability and how it is addressed by CCE researchers. The authors created a 25,920,583-word corpus from papers published in top CCE journals related to sustainability. Significant collocates of the word sustainability were then identified using collocational analysis, and their relationships mapped through collocational network analysis to uncover dominant research areas in CCE. Observations from over 30 years of sustainability research suggests that the CCE disciplines have largely anchored to generalized notions of sustainability, such as ‘the three pillars of sustainability.’ However, deeper analysis provides a more nuanced view. We propose an alternate paradigm of three interconnected environments where CCE professionals operate, highlight criteria for decision-making, and identify primary actions for sustainability.