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Sustainable construction projects affect various stakeholders with different social, environmental and economic interests. It is essential that the decision makers maintain effective communication with relevant groups to avoid project failures. Although citizen participation offers a means of better addressing and meeting stakeholder concerns and expectations, the decision/evaluations of contemporary sustainable projects are becoming ever more complicated, with an increasing number of stakeholders involved to actively defend their own interests. In response, this paper provides a thorough and comprehensive analysis of the stakeholders of sustainable construction in China and quantifies their influence in decision/evaluations by semi-structured interviews (in research stage I) and a three-round Delphi survey (in research stage II). Follow-up interviews (in research stage III) are carried out to collect more in-depth views concerning the characteristics and the respective importance of each stakeholder group involved. The findings indicate that the government is the most influential entity and the extent to which its intervention is needed in balancing the interests of other stakeholders presents a major challenge. The high potential influence of end-users is also identified, suggesting the need for a more transparent and inclusive participatory decision/evaluation process in the country. An enhanced future role for NGOs is further identified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rapid urbanization poses a significant challenge of accommodating the poor, particularly in developing countries such as China where affordable housing has only been initiated a few years ago and will continue to be developed in the coming years. Two major considerations in affordable housing programs are cost and time, as the ability to meet the needs of low-income households is the main target of these programs. However, it is not a common strategy to address affordable housing shortage by means of incorporating sustainability features. One of critical issues is the lack of sustainability framework to integrate sustainability in affordable housing. This paper aims to identify the key sustainability performance indicators (KSPIs) which are useful to guide the development of affordable housing. A preliminary list of 42 key sustainability performance indicators of affordable housing was identified through an extensive literature review. This was followed by a questionnaire survey to solicit the professional views from three stakeholder groups, namely government, developers and academics in the Chinese construction industry. Via the fuzzy set theory and variance analysis, 24 KSPIs were finally highlighted. These findings provide useful references for policy makers as well as industry practitioners to develop affordable housing programs in a sustainable manner. This helps to achieve the sustainable development at the regional scale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]