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By providing an overview of the existing knowledge on public governance in the context of Construction 4.0, this review serves as a valuable resource for researchers, policymakers and practitioners interested in understanding the current state of public governance in the context of Construction 4.0 and identifying avenues for future research and practical implementation.

This article presents a systematic and comprehensive review of the academic literature on public governance in the context of Construction 4.0. To ensure a systematic and rigorous selection of source material, the study adopts the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses guidelines.

By examining a wide range of scholarly works, the review identifies and discusses eight recurring themes that are crucial for understanding the role of public governance in Construction 4.0. These themes include policy and regulation, infrastructure and investment, skill development and education, digital inclusion and access, collaboration and partnerships, data governance and privacy, interactions with environmental and societal goals and the impact of Construction 4.0 on public governance itself. The review highlights a significant disparity between the normative debates on the importance of public governance in Construction 4.0 and the empirical knowledge available regarding its practical implementation. While the literature emphasizes the need for effective governance mechanisms to address the challenges and opportunities presented by Construction 4.0, there is a notable lack of empirical research examining the actual implementation and outcomes of public governance strategies.

This is the first systematic review of academic literature on public governance in the context of Construction 4.0.

The paper seeks to define the nature of the policy problems in Dutch building control.

The authors use Dunn's four‐phase methodology for public policy analysis, consisting of problem sensing, problem search, problem definition, and problem specification. Both a literature review and a field study into the operation of local building control authorities were undertaken. The field study incorporates characteristics of a survey, with methodology developed by Fowler.

Dutch building control legislation has been subject to many changes over the 100 years or so that it has been in force as it has responded to society's changing priorities. Throughout this period building regulation has become more detailed and more uniform across the country. Nevertheless, almost no legal changes have been made to the enforcement system. Responsibility for building control still lies with the municipalities and implementation is still not established by national legislation or policy document. Ongoing attempts to deregulate and standardise the legislative framework should therefore not stop at changing the regulations. Changes in the supervision system might offer an alternative route to improving the quality of the (technical) building control and clarifying the tasks and responsibilities of building control staff.

The analysis focuses on problems in building control and does not consider design and construction problems.

The field study contains important lessons for building control practitioners and policymakers regarding current deficiencies in the implementation of building control legislation.

The paper provides a model for the analysis, and comparative study, of building control systems in other jurisdictions.

The purpose of this paper is first, to gain insight into how the European member states have addressed the concept of sustainability in their building regulatory frameworks; and second, to gain insight in the effects of harmonization attempts of these frameworks by the European Commission (EC).

Data on the member states' building regulatory regimes were gathered using a survey questionnaire. The survey questionnaire addressed over 60 different aspects of sustainable construction that may, in various ways, be regulated by the member states.

The data obtained show mixed results. Some aspects of sustainable construction show far‐reaching homogeneity, whilst others do not. It appears that current EC directives have a positive effect on homogeneity of sustainable construction regulation throughout Europe. However, this does not provide a firm base to advise more directives, as these often appear a too resource‐intensive tool to achieve sustainable construction in a timely fashion. Additional and complementary approaches to such directives are proposed.

The paper presents an overview of how European member states have addressed various aspects of sustainable construction in their construction regulatory frameworks. This provides valuable insights for further studies on regulatory change, regulatory convergence and divergence, and policy outcomes related to sustainable construction in the European Union. Also, the study presents a number of approaches to achieve homogeneity that may complement earlier approaches taken by the EC.

The paper aims to document the effects of the privatisation of building code enforcement regimes. It notes that privatisation is generally accompanied by trade‐offs between competing democratic values such as effectiveness, efficiency, accountability, and equity and explores the extent to which particular trade‐offs might be related to aspects of the design of the regimes in which they occur.

The paper uses a comparative case study analysis of two Australian and two Canadian privatised building control regimes. This comparison is based on semi‐structured interviews with key actors in the building and building control industries.

Evidence of the expected trade‐offs between competing democratic values is found in the privatised regimes within the case study. Some of these might be explained in terms of the extent of private sector involvement (PSI) in a regime, or of the nature of the relationship between the public and the private sectors within it. However, not all trade‐offs are necessarily related to these characteristics. Overall, PSI deliver an increase in effectiveness and efficiency but at a particular cost of public accountability. A competitive, rather than a complementary, relationship between the private and public sectors in a privatised regime is also found to be more likely to generate problems related to the equity of the service being provided.

The case studies are explorative in nature and the research does not therefore claim empirical generalization, but instead provides illustrations of the impacts that might result from privatising building code enforcement. The paper is largely based on a series of interviews. The findings should be understood as the aggregated opinions of the interviewees.

Based on the case study analysis, the paper draws important conclusions for policymakers in this area. It suggests that privatisation should be performed with the utmost care and highlights positive features of the regimes studied that might indicate some of the ingredients of a successful privatisation. These include providing private sector inspectors with the opportunity to specialize, confining PSI to assessment tasks, and ensuring that a complementary relationship exists between the private and public sectors within the privatised regime.

The paper makes original contributes to existing literature on the impact of the “policy mix” on regulatory governance, and on the trade‐offs which result from the introduction of the private sector into regulatory governance.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce a tool for the international comparative analysis of regulatory regimes in the field of building regulation.

On the basis of a heuristic model drawn from regulatory literature, a typology of building regulatory regimes is introduced. Each type is illustrated with a number of real‐life examples from North America, Europe, and Australia.

Governments worldwide have introduced building regulatory regimes with a variety of designs. On an abstract level, these designs are shown to have a comparable pattern. This pattern is utilised to draw up a typology of regime‐designs that can be placed on a sliding scale, with a “pure public regime” at the one end and a “pure private regime” at the other. Intermediate regimes display characteristics of both.

The comparative analysis of different regimes assists policy makers by demonstrating which combinations of regulatory characteristics can provide the best results in particular instances. The typology introduced by the paper assists this process by providing a tool for systematic analysis of complex real‐life cases.

In this chapter, we analyze the interactions between local governments and citizens’ initiatives. In the Netherlands, local governments take up the role of civic enabler based on a modest approach that leaves citizens room to invent and design initiatives on what they deem to be public issues by facilitating and activating their efforts. We focus on how a proactive form of this approach toward citizens’ initiatives in deprived neighborhoods affects citizen–government relations. Our research is based on a case study in the city of Amsterdam. We find that particularly more women and migrants took up a wide variety of initiatives, which suggests that the neighborhood approach is more inclusive than deliberative approaches. We also find that initiators developed a positive attitude toward public institutions that enable them and that they started to see frontline workers as collaborators in their initiatives with whom they could have personal and authentic interactions, as opposed to the cool bureaucratic response from government officials that they were used to. To close the chapter, we discuss some risks of the proactive enabling approach, we compare our findings to problems that citizens’ initiatives often face during their interactions with local institutional actors in the Netherlands found in other literature, and we briefly discuss possible implications of practicing a modest enabling approach for developments in governance.

This paper discusses plausible future scenarios for small and medium tourism enterprises (SMTEs) in the “sun, sea and sand” destination of the Canary Islands (Spain) and assesses to what extent they are prepared to adjust to market changes and technological developments in the light of both sudden disruptions and long-term shocks.

A scenario analysis was made based upon expert interviews, leading to a 2 × 2 scenario matrix.

Although regional, national and European strategies advocate digital transformation as a step towards building resilience and towards a more sustainable future, this study identifies two major uncertainties that can put that transformation at risk: a change of the traditional “sun, sand and sea” visitor to a more conscious, individual and inquisitive traveller or “Promad”, and the business culture of SMTEs.

Resilience for sudden and for slow-paced disruptions poses different challenges for SMTEs. Their next step in the digital transformation must take them form marketing and sales-oriented e-business to growing interconnectivity and innovation across supply chains.

A market change towards the “Promad” type of traveller causes at least a temporary mismatch of demand and supply. As many SMTEs miss either the knowledge or the resources to invest in digital transformation, the process will depend on support and coordination at destination level.

The study identifies, with the example of the Canary Islands, the difficulties for destinations and individual businesses in making the envisioned transition of mass tourism to more competitive forms of tourism with a smaller ecological footprint.