Construction Industry in Kenya
Kenya is a developing country that is being faced with the exponential growth of institutional buildings accompanied by enormous water, power, processed, and natural materials utilization as a result of increased urbanization.
Increased urbanization is attributed with loss of agricultural land, water and material crisis and severe environmental problems like noise pollution, air pollution, solid waste and sewerage generated from buildings (Dalibi et al., 2017) therefore the building industry are culpable of numerous practices in this concern and it countered with a concept known as green buildings (GBs) to promote and ensure environmental sustainability.
In spite of all theses evident challenges and drastic measures, sustainable construction practices are slowly being implemented and practiced at a slow pace in Kenya’s Construction Industry.
This is troublesome and maybe a result of selected factors hindering the application of sustainable construction practices. Besides, these factors may be attributed to the concept itself or the key project stakeholders this study will delve on determining challenges hindering adoption of sustainable construction practices in institutional building
The construction industry performs a critical role in promoting the national economy worldwide (Yu et al., 2017) being a main consumer of water, raw materials and energy this is disagreement with the concepts of sustainability (Yeheyis et al. 2016). Due to this in the last two decades, the international construction community has been actively supporting sustainable construction practices worldwide (Maskil-Leitan and Reychav 2018).
In Kenya, research on sustainability in the building environment more specific on the perception of stakeholders on the concept of sustainable construction practice and their applications has mainly been neglected
Previous studies conducted in the developing countries cities like Nairobi rarely pay attention to perceptions and stakeholders’ understanding of the concepts of Sustainable construction practices as the reason for the building construction trends seen in Africa cities. As a result, it arises needs to grasp why developing countries are being left behind in adopting sustainable construction practices in spite of increasing global realization of the consequences of the construction industry in attaining sustainability in natural resources utilization. This study focusses on this knowledge gap by acquiring an understanding of how construction stakeholders in the Kenya construction industry understand the concepts of sustainable construction practices and why sustainable construction practices have overwhelmingly been disregarded. The study will be conducted in Nairobi County, which is the main institutional, state administrative and commercial centre in Kenya and is experiencing a rise in construction of the institutional buildings that disregards sustainable construction practices