Call for Papers: Beyond traditional project management: the role of projects and programs in responding to societal and humanitarian issues

There is an increasing demand from projects and programs in the past decade to address society's urgent needs arising from multiple crises due to persistent armed conflicts and the climate crisis.The United Nations Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in its Global Humanitarian overview predicts that more than 300 million people will need humanitarian assistance globally (OCHA, 2025). The year 2025 saw major conflicts such as Ukraine in Europe, Gaza in the Middle East, Sudan and elsewhere in Africa [1]. As a result, more than 124 million people were displaced or suffered violence. At the same time, the climate crisis [2] is affecting the lives and livelihoods of more than 93 million people. This is causing food insecurity due to weather changes such as droughts, floods and cyclones that will result in hunger. The United Nations (UN) and its partner organizations are appealing for over $47 billion to assist over 190 million people across 72 countries (OCHA, 2025). Indeed, the World Economic Forum (WEF) predicts the increased risk of “polycrisis,” “where disparate crises interact such that the overall impact exceeds the sum of each part” (Torkington, 2023; Lawrence et al., 2024). The WEF is also raising the prospect of stagflation, a period of slow growth accompanied by rising inflation causing harm to middle- and low-growth economies. The WEF also predicts that 85 million jobs could be lost due to advances in artificial intelligence in 2025.The International Organization of Migration's impact report estimates that 117 million people worldwide face a displacement crisis due to conflicts and natural disasters (IOM, 2024). Projects and programs will be expected to play a transformative role to keep pace with these societal concerns.Such a transformative role will require us to think critically about specific issues in our disciplines such as purposeful leadership and personal responsibility (Whyte et al., 2022; Konstantinou, 2025), project organizing (Krause, 2014), building resilience (Naderpajouh et al., 2023) and digital transformation (Brown et al., 2022).The focus of this call for papers is how projects respond to these challenging issues in turbulent times. Papers submitted to this special issue will address the role played by projects and programs to address these societal and humanitarian concerns would include but not be limited to the following:Project studies provide an intellectual framework affording a common home for the different disciplinary, inter disciplinary and transdisciplinary, projects addressing societal and humanitarian issues globally. We therefore request the global community of project management scholars to help to meet these challenges by providing theorized empirical case studies of projects oriented to societal and humanitarian concerns caused by conflicts, climate change, dislocations, forced repatriations and the impact of artificial intelligence on employment. We expect articles thatThis special issue invites researchers to investigate projects focused on addressing challenges faced due to societal and humanitarian concerns. The research reported would potentially cover how projects and programs were conceived, developed and implemented and how they are organized and delivered to contribute to addressing such concerns.Researchers who are engaged in projects and programs under the scope of this special issue could potentially use novel methods for project management researchers. These could include but are not limited toThe methods used to manage these challenging projects and programs may be developed specifically to meet stakeholder needs to address societal and humanitarian concerns (Rossignoli et al., 2017). Thus, the methods may be locally contextual and situated in specific practices rather than grounded in theory. The success criteria for these types of projects and programs may be centered explicitly on purpose and value rather than cost. Timeliness and quality from the immediate stakeholders' point of view will be specifically important (Clegg et al., 2021, 2024). We expect that this will lead authors to include new theoretical implications from the research being reported. Potential theories that could be relevant include but are not limited toWe expect the papers in the special issue to contribute to UN Sustainable Development Goals 1, 2, 10 and 13.The following questions may help authors consider potential areas to address:Authors should submit a full paper complying with regular IJMPB author guidelines (see https://www.emeraldgrouppublishing.com/journal/ijmpb) that will be subject to the routine review process used by the journal.The anticipated timelines for this special issue areNote: Authors presenting relevant papers at EURAM 2026 Project Organising Special Track ST10_02 Project and Society are invited to consider submitting to this special issue.For further information or additional questions, please contact one of the guest editors of this special issue.