Construction Contracting Management Obstacles in Palestine

Abstract

The construction industry is complex, widely varying and many factors influencing its projects’ outcome. As construction projects become larger and more complex, managing these projects and their challenges become more complicated and core element for success. During the past few years, many of the construction projects in West Bank went beyond timeline with extra cost overruns, many obstacles faced the contracting process, and generally the contracting career failed to take what it deserved of commensurate development. The objectives of this paper are to study the construction contracting sector in Palestine, highlighting this sector problems and obstacles from the perspective of local contract parties (project owners, consultants, contractors and donor countries institutes), investigating their importance and comparing these observations with those in other more governor and profitable surrounding Arab countries, in order to develop solutions and improve the current sector situation. Results from the study showed that the problems related to the career ethics are the most important problems that the Palestinian construction sectors suffers from. The results also showed that the major construction contracting problems are: policy adoption of awarding the bid to the lowest prices not to the most accurate, delaying contractor owed payments, currency exchange changing value, owner deceleration in decision making, little projects size in relation to contractors number, construction materials changing prices due to inflation, declining in the country economic situation, contractors manoeuvres by downloading some prices on other items and presence of conflicts between tender documents. Based on these findings, proposed solutions are developed for solving and improving the current state. Also, a proposed framework solution was developed for solving and avoiding the resulted most important problems and improving the current sector state. Finally, recommendations for the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) and the competent authorities, the (PCU) and the different local contract parties are presented in this paper helping them in overcoming the current sector related obstacles.