Managing green building development - A review of current state of research and future directions

Understanding the development process of Green Buildings (GBs) is critical in realizing their uptake. An in-depth review of 77 relevant studies is conducted to identify the various paradigms of GB development research, their contributions and limitations, their overlaps, and the ways of improving these paradigms. A code developed using Boolean operators and keywords is employed to search online databases (including Scopus and Web of Science) for relevant studies available until February 2019. Six paradigms of GB development research have been identified, including: Project Delivery Attributes (PDAs), Critical Success Factors (CSFs), barriers, drivers, risks, and benefits. A framework is developed to explain the role of various paradigms. Collectively, 323 factors encompassing the green building development research are identified. The literature analysis shows that 69 identified factors overlap across the six paradigms which highlights the common content across these paradigms. Overall, GB development research can be described as highly context-specific and relying on survey-based approaches. The PDA, barrier, and benefit paradigms are relatively more empirical in their methodological approaches, while the other paradigms typically employ non-empirical approaches. PDA and CSF as well as the Driver and Benefit paradigm tend to be closely related in terms of their conceptual approach and factors common across them. The review contributes to theory by providing a comprehensive database of the factors considered in the GB development literature. Furthermore, based on methodological and content-related limitations of the published research, the study provides recommendations for future research to increase the breadth and depth of research in this area.