An Assessment of Environmental Sustainability Compliance in Public Procurement of Works in Ghana
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Date
November, 2019
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Abstract
The need for sustainability ascended from the recognition that the wasteful, excessive, and
inequitable nature of current patterns of development, given the not-too-distant future
projection, presents not a desirable ecosystem. Humanity must therefore as a matter of urgency
and necessity save the remnants of the only environment readily available to humans. If it can
be agreed that an essential precondition to a sustainable socio-economic system is a sustainable
environment, then it should be logical to take actions that will enhance environmental
sustainability compliance. The literature on sustainable procurement in both the public and
private sector has seen a steep increase over the last few years. Such literature include research
on the “development of sustainability in public sector procurement, which focused on the
actors and factors that influence the speed of implementation of sustainability initiatives in the
Netherlands. Despite the growing interest in sustainability, there is still scarcity of information
on environmental sustainability compliance in public procurement of works. The purpose of
this study was therefore pivoted at filling that research void in the Ghanaian context. The
philosophical paradigm adopted in this study was that of positivism, where the positivist
epistemology is objectivism. This study took place in the two largest cities in Ghana, where
the study mainly employed a purposive sampling technique which was augmented with
snowball sampling to select a sample of two hundred and sixty (260) out of which a total of
one hundred and sixty-one (161) questionnaires were successfully retrieved which represented
approximately 73% of the questionnaires administered. The electronic questionnaires
(softcopy) were emailed to the respondents in a form of attached Microsoft Word file and a
web link produced by Google Form so as to aid online responses. The Cronbach’s alpha
coefficient test was employed to measure the internal consistency and reliability of data from
the adopted scale of measurement. The descriptive analysis of the demographic data collected
was then followed. Factor analysis, mean score ranking, crosstabulation, relative importance
index (RII), and one sample t-test were the analytical tools employed to achieve the specific
objectives of the study. The findings of the study were that in the Ghanaian construction
industry perspective, keeping land clearance to a minimum, use of sustainable fuel, segregating
and recycling solid wastes generated by construction activities, and noise control were found
to be the key environmentally friendly practices being complied with. Furthermore, the results
from this study using the Alston’s Likert scale interpretation range, indicated that the Ghanaian
construction industry moderately comply with environmental sustainability practices. The
recommendation therefore is that the government of Ghana should institute policies that will
compel contractors to comply with environmental sustainability.
Description
Thesis submitted to the Department of Construction Technology and Management, Kwame
Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the award degree of Master of Philosophy in Procurement Management
Keywords
Sustainability, procurement, public procurement, sustainable public procurement,, environmental sustainability, compliance, Ghanaian construction industry