Project developer in the domain of land settlement project are involved with many stakeholders and are usually overflown by data relative to technical, economic and social issues. This paper contributes to the necessary multi-scale approach challenge and we propose a holistic framework that enables to describe the development process of land settlement project and assess its sustainability. It would help developers to take decisions compliant with the project complexity. In the model driven engineering perspective, the metamodel framework is described with the ISO 19440 four views to represent complex systems: architectural, structural, functional and behavioural. We confront it to describe two case studies: the successful project of hydro-wind power plant in El Hierro in the Canaries, and the Sivens Dam project in France sadly famous for its deadly outcome. Their comparison enables us to draw hypothesis on what are the ingredients of success and validate the framework. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.