AUTHOR=Wen Shiping , Qiang Guofeng 

TITLE=Managing Stakeholder Concerns in Green Building Projects With a View Towards Achieving Social Sustainability: A Bayesian-Network Model

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Environmental Science

VOLUME=Volume 10 - 2022

YEAR=2022

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/environmental-science/articles/10.3389/fenvs.2022.874367

DOI=10.3389/fenvs.2022.874367

ISSN=2296-665X

ABSTRACT=Green building projects (GBPs) involve multiple interdependent stakeholders, whose individual and separate concerns have different degrees of impact on sustainability management. These concerns are highly complex, subject to many uncertainties, and pose significant challenges to decision-makers during sustainability assessments, especially with regard to the social aspects of the project. As such, addressing the complexity of stakeholder concerns and optimizing the decision-making process in green building projects from the stakeholder perspective are crucial to improving practices in social sustainability management. However, to date, there is a lack of relevant empirical studies on this subject. This study proposes a decision-making model based on Bayesian networks (BN); a project network decision model is also constructed from a social sustainability perspective. A diagnostic analysis and sensitivity analysis of the constructed model identify the key stakeholder concerns that affect the social sustainability of the project. To verify its feasibility, the BN model is applied to a green building project, specifically, the Wuhan International Commerce Center, China. The results identify green design and construction, an abundance and stability of project funds, and conveniently-situated service facilities as the primary, sensitive stakeholder concerns that significantly impact social sustainability. The results prove the feasibility of the BN model as a sustainable management decision-making tool for this project. This study resolves the uncertainty problem related to the changes of sustainability levels caused by the complexity of stakeholders. Moreover, the results broaden the field of social sustainability in green building projects. These findings help project decision-makers to individually manage stakeholders according to the stakeholders’ different concerns and also help improve the social sustainability level of green building projects.