Review of Critical Success Factors (CSFs) for green building projects

In the past decade, many efforts have been devoted to exploring the Critical Success Factors (CSFs) for Green Building (GB) projects. However, there is absence of a systematic review exploring these studies. Therefore, the paper presents a comprehensive review of publications from 2005 to 2018 on CSFs for GB projects. The results indicate there is a growing interest in the exploration of CSFs for GB projects since 2010. The main contributing contributors, institutions, countries and areas, as well as research methods in this area are summarized. The mostly identified CSFs for GB projects are communication and cooperation between project participants, effective project planning and control, owner's involvement and commitment, clear goals and objectives and project manager's performance. The contractors and owners were found more related to these identified CSFs. Finally, knowledge gaps are discussed and future research directions including: (1) more studies on relationships between the CSFs; (2) extending studies to cover all building types; (3) more investigation on CSFs for different project objectives; (4) more emphasis on how to implement CSFs for GB projects are proposed. The results could offer a favorable reference for researchers to obtain a thorough picture of the current research woks and facilitate further study in this area. The discussion of GB CSFs could also broaden the understanding of the best ways for implementing GB projects to practitioners thereby reducing the setbacks towards its implementation.