Infrastructure Projects and Project Management in Brazil: Challenges and Trends

The scene of Brazilian infrastructure has changed in recent years, highlighting the growing participation of the private sector and the falling public investments as a result of the constraints on the federal public expenditure as from 2016, the Lava Jato operation, and reduction in the number of available loans. Particularly, the Lava Jato operation led most Brazilian infrastructure corporations to fully rethink their processes and opened the way for new national and international companies. In the restructuring phase, project management has shown itself to be sensitive to the changes made. In this sense, fostering risk management in the corporations, combined with efficient cost management, tends to become a decisive factor to guarantee the results of projects. Integrated management solutions, obtaining licenses, regularization, and authorization also became essential to attain efficiency in the use of resources. Considering the scenario of infrastructure projects in Brazil, this chapter discusses the market and internationalization trends in infrastructure projects, and the current state of project management knowledge through diagnosis and cases. Aiming to contribute to a better comprehension of procurement, risk, cost, and stakeholder management, as well as by using Building Information Modelling (BIM) processes to support the efforts to address challenges in the sector, some recent research results are summarized. Further, ethics and governance as pillars for infrastructure project management are also discussed in the text. In the conclusion, we present some proposals about new management areas that can be truly relevant in infrastructure project management in a developing country.