Procurement Strategy in Megaprojects: A Systematic Literature Review and Research Agenda

Megaprojects are delivered by a large network of suppliers, who are procured by client organizations (contracting authorities), and represent a significant part of their cost. Megaprojects constitute a global market economy that mobilizes trillions. Procurement at this scale has the power to shape markets, create ecosystems, and drive regional development and economic growth. Effective procurement must move beyond transactions and act as a value-creation tool across the megaproject system, enabling socioeconomic outcomes. Yet, extant procurement literature presents significant fragmentation, emphasizing more technical explorations of isolated procurement elements. Procurement strategy is one of the strongest levers influencing megaproject performance, creating the conditions to drive the individual and collective performance of supply chain actors. Designing procurement strategies requires a programmatic approach that connects the client’s mission, internal capabilities, and project complexity with the supply chain’s capacity and capability to deliver outputs and outcomes. Such strategies address the make or buy decision, influence intra- and interorganizational capabilities, engage the market for intelligence (capacity, capability, dynamics, appetite), establish relationships, decompose scope into packages, create interfaces and boundaries, allocate risk, design incentivization schemes, and enable interface management and systems integration. This systematic literature review explores the procurement literature, examining how clients design procurement strategies to engage and build a supply network. A total of 4,228 titles and abstracts were analyzed, and 91 papers were fully reviewed. Six categories were established to organize procurement decisions and disseminate the results: (1) understanding the outcomes, (2) engaging the market, (3) packaging the works, (4) selecting the delivery model, (5) selecting the contracting model, and (6) defining and implementing a successful tender process. We present the Procurement Strategy in Megaprojects (PRIME) framework informed by the main theoretical lenses used in procurement studies as a structure to support clients in establishing their procurement strategies. We suggest three avenues to advance research: (1) procurement capability of clients, (2) packaging and incentivization, and (3) collaboration models and mechanisms.