INTRODUCTION

The Brundtland Report defines Sustainable De­velopment (SD) as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own

DOI: 10.4018/978-1-4666-6268-1.ch001 needs” (World Commission on Environment and Development 1987: 41).

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The long term perspective can be brought into projects, when considering the investment initiated by the project. Gareis et al. (2013) propose that the highest potential of influence to consider SD in a project is taken in the project initiation process, when the investment decision is taken. Thus it is essential that SD principles are considered in the investment analysis to take an adequate decision and to contribute to the SD of the investor's orga­nization and other relevant stakeholders.

In the context of project management, process related rather than content related definitions of SD are of relevance, therefore we consider the SD principles (Gareis et al. 2013) economic, ecologic and social-orientation; short, mid and long term­orientation; local, regional and global-orientation as well as values-based as those principles relevant for SD in the initiation of a project.¹

We analyzed project and program management standards such as PMBOK® Guide, the Standard for Program Management (both Project Manage­ment Institute 2008a), PRINCE 2, Managing Suc­cessful Programmes (both Office of Government Commerce 2009) as well as ICB (International Project Management Association 2006) for their explicit and implicit consideration of SD prin­ciples in the investment analysis. We found little evidence of considering SD principles, therefore we turned to the Logical Framework Approach (LFA) (Norad 1999; The World Bank 1997), used by the World Bank, to see what we can learn from the initiation of development projects regarding investment analysis.

Typical investment analysis methods only focus on economic aspects, and are therefore rather limited. We discuss different investment analysis methods such as business case analysis, cost benefit analysis, social cost benefit analysis as well as the environmental impact analysis and see how SD principles are considered.

B ased on the concept of responsible investment and what we could learn from the initiation of development projects, we propose a more holis­tic project investment analysis which considers SD principles. We argue that it is not enough to consider SD principles only in the investment analysis itself, but also the consideration of dif­ferent stakeholder perspectives in the investment decision is essential.

This chapter is structured as following. First, we clarify the term investment as well as responsible and ethical investment. Then we discuss the differ­ence between project and investment and introduce the project initiation process and important invest­ment analysis methods. After briefly presenting our analyses results of project and program management standards, we more describe the LFA and analyze how SD principles are considered in the initiation of development projects. Then we indicate poten­tials to implement SD principles in the investment life cycle and propose a more holistic approach of project initiation, which considers the investment method as well as the design of the initiation pro­cess of a project.