ICT4D Project Sustainability: An ANT-based Analysis

The difficulty of sustaining ICT4D projects in developing nations is a formidable issue encountered by project managers. Addressing this issue is vital given reasons such as the opportunity cost of IT investment failure in developing-world contexts. This paper presents a study which explores the sustainability of ICT4D projects via a case study of a large-scale, nation-wide, government sector ICT4D project that targets agricultural development in a developing nation in South Asia. In exploring project sustainability, ANT concepts are employed to extend analysis beyond the typical influencing factor and sustainability dimension-based interpretations and visualize and explore project sustainability as a dynamic phenomenon involving the evolution of critical relationships in actor-networks. The study identified two types of networks (i.e. global and local) and nine critical relationships that influence ICT4D project sustainability. Its key contribution is a theoretical approach for enabling ICT4D project sustainability based upon the construction and sustenance of critical relationships.