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

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.