Configuring Success: Unveiling Key Configurations for Enhanced Design Coordination in Hydropower Projects

Abstract

Design coordination in hydropower projects is both complex and challenging due to their scale, environmental impact, or technological complexity. The current understanding of how to effectively enhance it is limited and often contradictory. This research explores five key conditions impacting design coordination: technical conditions, digital design capabilities, designers’ dynamic capabilities, partnering, and incentives. Utilizing fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) on 28 large-scale hydropower project cases, this study identifies five distinct configurations that facilitate high-level design coordination, which can be grouped into three types: capability-centric, stakeholder-centric, and a hybrid approach combining both capability and stakeholder focus. The findings reveal that both high- and low-level design coordination outcomes can be achieved through various configurations of these conditions. This study advances the understanding of design coordination by adopting a configurational perspective and contributes to the literature on the adoption of emerging technologies and practices. Design coordination in hydropower projects is complex but critical because it can influence the project’s feasibility, environmental harmony, and social acceptance. This research explores five key conditions impacting design coordination among project stakeholders: technical conditions, digital design capabilities, designers’ dynamic capabilities, partnering, and incentives. The results of this study offer significant managerial suggestions to project managers in the hydropower industry. First, enhancing design coordination by investing in improving technical conditions may be valuable but is only useful when combined with strengthening designers’ digital design capabilities and other strategies, such as developing partnering relationships with stakeholders to engage them in coordination. Even then, the effect may be marginal. This finding suggests that to fulfill the desired effectiveness when using new technologies, managers of design companies should pay attention to hiring capable personnel and improving organizational capabilities for developing partnerships with stakeholders. Secondly, achieving high-performance design coordination seems easier than avoiding low-performance design coordination because applying a few high-level strategies may result in high-level design coordination. The finding implies that even strengthening designers’ dynamic capabilities can achieve high-level design coordination given underperforming technical conditions. Managers should be more optimistic when improving design coordination even if financial support for advanced technologies is lacking.