Barriers in Nigeria’s public hospital green buildings implementation initiatives
Journal of Facilities Management
ISSN: 1472-5967
Article publication date: 18 August 2021
Issue publication date: 28 July 2022
Abstract
Purpose
The high consumption of energy by buildings may have enhanced land degradation, flooding, air pollution and many other hazardous environmental issues. However, green practices in buildings have been proved as one of the successful technologies to mitigate these issues. Past studies have shown lax green practices in Nigerian buildings. Concerning public hospital buildings, this is yet to be explored. Therefore, this paper aims to investigate the barriers to green practices and proffer possible policy solutions to promote hospital green buildings.
Design/methodology/approach
In attaining these objectives, the view of hospital building contractors, design team, hospital management and policymakers in the relevant ministries/agencies was engaged via virtual interviews. The collated data were analysed and presented in the thematic pattern.
Findings
Findings show that green building construction is extremely low in Nigeria, but the worst hit is the health-care buildings across the states. Government/policy-related, organisational/leadership-related, financial-related, technical-related, design team-related and stakeholders’ behaviour-related barriers emerged as the main six themes of barriers affecting public hospital green buildings implementation initiatives. Findings show that proffering possible policies to addressing these barriers may improve public hospital green construction across the states.
Research limitations/implications
This paper is limited to barriers to green buildings implementation in public hospitals in Nigeria, and data collection was through virtual interviews but does not affect the strength of the findings. Thus, this paper suggests that the sub-themes and variables/items that emerged from the collated data as presented in Figure 1 can be further developed quantitatively via questionnaire survey to validate and improve the reliability of results from this paper.
Practical implications
As part of this study’s implications, suggestions from this paper will stir up policymakers’ decisions, to be tailored towards achieving green buildings implementation initiatives in Nigerian public hospitals.
Originality/value
To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is probably the first that attempted to investigate the barriers to green buildings implementation in public hospitals in Nigeria.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
Special thanks to the participants for providing knowledgeable contributions to enhance the findings of this paper. Also, the authors appreciate the comments, suggestions, and recommendations provided by the anonymous reviewers, which collectively helped hone and strengthen the quality of this manuscript during the blind peer-review process.
Funding: Faculty of Engineering and Built Environment and CIDB Centre of Excellence (05-35-061890), University of Johannesburg, Johannesburg, South Africa.
Citation
Ebekozien, A., Ayo-Odifiri, S.O., Nwaole, A.N.C., Ibeabuchi, A.L. and Uwadia, F.E. (2022), "Barriers in Nigeria’s public hospital green buildings implementation initiatives", Journal of Facilities Management, Vol. 20 No. 4, pp. 586-605. https://doi.org/10.1108/JFM-01-2021-0009
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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