Challenges for the Implementation of Sustainable Construction Practices in Developing Countries: A Bibliometric Review

Developing countries face the constant challenges of implementing sustainable practices in their construction industry. However, a literature review is still needed to bring together the disaggregated studies and determine the development status of the sustainable construction research field. This study explores the challenges the construction sector faces in developing countries in integrating sustainability practices into infrastructure delivery. Through a bibliometric review, this study analyses articles from the Scopus database published between 2011 and 2021. The bibliometric analysis focused on analysing sustainable construction research publications and citation patterns, while content analysis was used to identify the primary levels of analysis and topical focuses. Emerging trends in the sustainable construction research field are reported. The study also determined the most productive authors and collaboration among authors, most productive journals, and most active countries and publications with the highest impact on sustainable construction research. The study’s findings reveal the level of interest in sustainable construction by academics and industry practitioners in developing countries. This also informs on the level of awareness on sustainable development in developing countries. Challenges identified and discussed explore themes on institution support, stakeholders’ role, lack of regulation and legislation, and building standards and guidelines. The results are imperative for improving the understanding of challenges to sustainable development, which is vital to policy formulation and decision-making. The discussions also provide solutions to sustainable development challenges and offer strategies to drive adoption.