Special Purpose Entities and their role in Megaprojects: a new focus for understanding megaproject behaviour

Special Purpose Entities, “SPE”, are legal joint ventures (usually a limited company of some type or a limited partnership) created to fulfil a specific objectives. The main two applications of SPE in project management are project partnering and project financing, particularly for the delivery (and sometimes operations) of megaprojects. SPEs receive little attention from project management researched beyond their treatment as a financial instrument or risk mitigation measure. We contend that the influence of SPEs on a project’s behaviour needs to be explored and understood far more holistically. We argue that SPE have a profound effect on project governance, the relationships between actors within the project and ultimately on the project success. This paper provides a bibliometric analysis to pave the way to this research stream by analysing the historical adoption of SPE in projects, the evolution of the SPE literature and the existing gaps for future researches.