Investigating the Challenges of Green Building Methods in Iran and Providing Solutions

The construction industry in Iran is growing rapidly, resulting in adverse impacts on sustainable development and in particular the environment. In other parts of the world, to address these adverse impacts, the principles of the green building are applied. However, after interviewing the experts in the construction industry, it was concluded that the implementation of the green building practices is not going well. In this context, the question which this study is trying to address is why there is no construction project which implements the green building practices. Thus, the goal of this study is to assess the challenges and obstacles in implementing the green building practices based on experts’ opinions, executive and legislator institutions in the construction industry and present strategies to overcome the challenges. The difference between this study and the previous studies in this area in Iran, is that this study discovers the challenges and obstacles in implementing the green building practices in Iran with a qualitative approach, involves a wider level of analysis, and presents the solutions from the governmental point of view. This study employed the semi-structured interviews with the experts of the construction industry and used the open, axial, and selective coding techniques to analyze the findings. Eventually, 18 challenges are found encompassing two challenges related to the society, four challenges related to executive institutions and 12 challenges related to Legislator Institutions. Also, 19 solutions are extracted from the interviews with the experts including seven short-term solutions, two medium-term solutions and 10 long-term solutions. Among these solutions one solution is related to the society, two solutions are related to executive institutions, and 16 solutions are related to the Legislator Institutions.