Promoting project digital responsibility for sustainable digital construction: A perspective on the coupling of influencing factors

Project digital responsibility is critical for sustainable construction; however, to our best knowledge, it has not yet received significant attention from the construction industry. Project digital responsibility promotion (PDRP) remains underdeveloped. Exploring the PDRP influencing factors is critical to advancing its adoption and enhancing the project digital responsibility implementation. We combined on-site research, expert interviews, and document analysis to evaluate the influencing factors and their coupling relationships. By identifying PDRP influencing factors, constructing an N-K model, developing a complex network model, and analyzing influencing factors across multiple dimensions, we extracted the key influencing factors. The results indicate that: (1) the frequency of PDRP events does not positively correlate with the corresponding factor coupling strength; and (2) the more dimensional factors involved in the coupling, the better the PDRP will be facilitated. This may explain why previous governance strategies, which developed in response to the frequency of PDRP events, were ineffective. Internal stakeholders are the first-level factors with the highest coupling strength. Government, digital responsibility disclosure systems, social benefits, social climates, and economic benefits are the five key influencing second-level factors on PDRP. Few studies, to our best knowledge, have focused on PDRP influencing factors. Therefore, this study provides valuable insights into the project responsibility governance field, provides practical know-how for promoting project digital responsibility, deepens our understanding of how factors influence PDRP, and assesses the magnitude of their impact.