Formalising Sustainability Management as a Core Process Group in Project Management

Sustainability has become a strategic imperative for organisations, yet widely used project management standards such as the PMBoK sixth and seventh editions still do not formalise how sustainability should be embedded across project work. This gap matters because PMBoK-based processes shape governance, roles, documentation and performance expectations; without explicit mechanisms, teams lack a shared language, defined decision points and consistent metrics to translate ESG priorities into planning, execution, monitoring and closure. As a result, sustainability is often treated as an optional add-on, applied inconsistently, weakening stakeholder alignment, encouraging short-term optimisation and reducing ESG accountability and long-term value creation. Grounded in stakeholder theory and the natural resource–based view, this paper proposes a new PMBoK core process group and knowledge area called sustainability management. This research methodologically adopts a conceptual and standards-based analytical approach, combining systematic mapping, alignment and extension of sustainability principles across PMBoK sixth and seventh editions. By formalising sustainability management as a dedicated process group and knowledge area, the study advances existing project management literature by translating sustainability from a dispersed normative orientation into an explicit, auditable and repeatable governance architecture.