Evaluating Stakeholder Management Practices in the Building Permit Process

Abstract

The building permit process is a complex, interdisciplinary procedure involving multiple stakeholders, such as regulatory authorities, developers, architects, and contractors. Managing stakeholders in the process is difficult due to their diverse and often conflicting interests and the complexity of navigating multiple regulatory requirements. Bibliographical research and analysis of existing interviews with building permitting experts are used to capture detailed perspectives from regulators, clients, architects, and contractors on existing management practices and challenges. Afterward, using a methodological approach, social network analysis (SNA) is carried out to investigate the impact of dynamics between key actors on stakeholder management interactions. SNA is used to map the relationships between stakeholders and to classify involved stakeholders in the building permit process. The results show that the degree of stakeholder engagement and the efficiency of communication networks vary across countries. The findings reveal that Germany exhibits the most efficient stakeholder coordination, while France faces bottlenecks in stakeholder communication. Sweden and Montenegro could benefit from improving direct communication between functional groups. This study contributes to developing more reliable stakeholder management practices and regulatory measures in building permit processes, thereby promoting procedural efficiency and stakeholder compliance in the construction industry. The findings of this study consist of an exhaustive overview of stakeholders in building permit processes. The derived classification using SNA could be used henceforth to define key performance indicators of stakeholders in building permit processes.