The sustainability-performance gap in Australian infrastructure
This research brief was published through ANZSOG's The Bridge newsletter, which connects academic research with public sector practice. It provides a concise summary of a piece of research relevant to public sector professionals.
While Australian government organisations promote sustainability in their strategic plans, they struggle to embed these same commitments in their own infrastructure and construction projects. An article in the Australian Journal of Public Administration examines this disconnect through the lens of strategic decoupling. This concept explains how organisations align with external expectations while internal practices remain unchanged.
As a result, middle managers may find their professional identities in conflict with organisational mandates and experience a moral burden. However, accountability can be strengthened when government organisations give managers the discretion to make informed professional decisions.
About strategic decoupling
Strategic decoupling, also referred to as policy–practice decoupling, is a framework for understanding the disconnect between what an organisation says and what it does. Organisations often adopt formal structures and symbolic policies to conform to institutional expectations without implementing these in day-to-day practice.
Decoupling has several characteristics:
symbolic compliance where organisations signal alignment with institutional norms (e.g. sustainability) to gain legitimacy
.operational inertia where core practices are resistant to change
.ambiguity where vague policies allow for variable interpretation and evade enforceable accountability.
Strategic decoupling is not necessarily a sign of dysfunction. It is a deliberate organisational response to manage conflicting institutional pressures.
Strategic decoupling in government organisations and sustainability
In Australian infrastructure and construction projects, strategic decoupling has emerged as a persistent challenge in meeting sustainability commitments. Government organisations have increasingly embedded sustainability in strategic artefacts such as climate action plans, net-zero targets and sustainable procurement frameworks. However, research reveals a mismatch between these commitments and their actual implementation.
Strategic decoupling provides a frame to understand how organisations symbolically comply with institutional expectations. However, its application to Australian state and local government infrastructure and construction projects is underexplored.
About the research
The research explored two questions:
How do strategic artefacts from Australian state and local government organisations represent sustainability commitments in infrastructure and construction projects?
How do project actors align their actions with this strategic intent?
The first stage of the research involved analysing strategic artefacts from six Australian state government and local government organisations. This included sustainability policies, climate change adaptation guidelines and infrastructure planning documents. Although the organisations differed in scale and jurisdiction, they had a dual responsibility as signatories to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. First to regulate sustainability, and second to model it through their own project practices.
The second stage involved 30 semi-structured interviews with a diverse range of project actors at the organisational middle manager level. This included project officers, sustainability advisors and procurement specialists. The interviews were designed to capture participant’ perceptions of how sustainability commitments are interpreted at the project level.
The relationship between institutional structures and practice
The research found decoupling was an outcome of the relationship between institutional structures and middle managers’ practice. Sustainability commitments in the state and local government artefacts were symbolic and lacked operational specificity and enforceability. Instead, sustainability commitments were actively maintained by practitioners through their everyday practices and decisions, despite the competing pressures of cost, time and quality.
Structures shape how practitioners understand and respond to competing demands, while their actions can reinforce or change those structures. The moral burden reported by practitioners highlights the challenges they face when sustainability competes with professional norms and organisational priorities. Similarly, the gap between strategic commitments and project execution shows that sustainability is not a fixed commitment. Rather, its meaning is continually negotiated and reshaped in practice.
Incremental change can occur when sustainability requirements both shape and are shaped by practitioners’ efforts. By working within project constraints while maintaining a focus on environmental stewardship, middle managers can gradually reshape existing practices from within. This suggests that accountability is strengthened when government organisations give managers the discretion to make informed professional decisions.
Meaningful change therefore depends on supporting practitioners to:
question existing practices and structures
move infrastructure projects beyond symbolic commitments towards genuine environmental stewardship.
The bottom line
Strategic infrastructure documents create an appearance of alignment with global sustainability norms while leaving commitments loosely defined. In practice, sustainability is often displaced by the competing pressures of time, cost and scope. This gap between formal commitments and enactment is shaped by how practitioners interpret these competing demands.
Sustainability is therefore not simply a matter of implementing policy. Practitioners negotiate its meaning as they respond to changing circumstances and organisational pressures. Their experiences reveal tensions between sustainability and professional norms which can both enable and constrain environmental stewardship.
Want to read more?
Decoupling sustainability and performance: How government infrastructure projects in Australia fare on strategic environmental commitments – Richard Hughes and Kerry Brown, Australian Journal of Public Administration, August 2026