ANALYZING CRITICAL SUCCESS FACTORS AND RISKS IN PROJECT MANAGEMENT PRACTICES IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES

Project management has primarily developed within high-income countries. However, over the last 15 years, capital-intensive projects have been shifting toward developing nations where conventional frameworks often underperform. Despite this, research on the critical success factors (CSFs) and risks influencing project outcomes in developing countries remains fragmented. This paper conducts a systematic literature review of 41 peer-reviewed articles published in the Scopus database in the last decade, covering 20 developing countries and 8 cross-country studies. Following the PRISMA protocol, this study identifies CSFs and risks in project management (PM) in developing countries through inductive review and deductive coding based on two theoretical lenses, namely, institutional and contingency theory. Furthermore, this paper analyzes the mechanisms and contextual dependency of these factors. The inductive findings identify 22 CSFs and 21 risk factors. In order to report the most critical ones, 8 CSFs and 8 risks are retained based on their frequency of occurrence. The results reveal that they form systematic corresponding pairs, with six of the eight CSFs directly mapping onto six risks. Moreover, institutional theory (IT) explains the dominance of external influences through coercive, normative, and mimetic mechanisms, as well as institutional voids, while the contingency theory (CT) shows variable outcomes across different project characteristics. Overall, the findings provide practical implications for project managers, policy makers and business organizations on managing projects in emerging countries. It is noted that project strategies should be adapted to project scale, with stakeholder-focused approaches in small projects, institutional building in medium projects, and macroeconomic and political risk management in large projects.

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