ABSTRACT
Time, money, and quality are the three basic criteria for measuring construction project efficiency. The Ethiopian construction sector in general and public work projects, in particular, are believed to suffer from inefficiencies despite their quantitative growth in recent years. Previous researches have made attempts to explore factors determining the efficiency of the sector such as the low capacity of contractors (both financial and equipment, shortage of skilled human resource on technical, managerial, and entrepreneurial skills, etc ), the poor performances of the supply chain, inflation in the economy and so on. However, process and system-based challenges of the sector resulting from the existing legal frameworks governing the sector such as the modes of delivery of projects (modes of contracting) have not been a subject of extensive study. In this study, doctrinal and non-doctrinal legal research methods are employed to explore project delivery system(s) recognized in Ethiopia's public work contract laws and appraise their efficiency in terms of ensuring prompt completion of public construction projects. The doctrinal aspect of the research exposed that, despite an implied recognition of Design-Build (DB) and its variant forms of project delivery system, the country's public work contract laws set up Design-Bid-Build (DBB) as a default mode of contracting. Besides, the result from a survey questionnaire of 158 respondents which was computed by using Research Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) to generate the Relative Importance Index (RII) of each mode of contracting corroborated by primary data derived from the completion and status report of 40 road and 9 building projects, shows that even though construction project time overrun (delay) often happens in both routes of contracting, the magnitude of such inefficiency is greater in public projects of DBB than DB delivery mode.
ABSTRACT
Construction time overrun is one of the common inefficiencies of public construction projects in Ethiopia. Laws and standard construction contracts stipulate different legal remedies against project time overrun. This paper is meant to unravel these legal remedies and their application to construction project time overrun in public construction projects in Ethiopia. To this end, the magnitude of time overrun, its common causes, and the practical implementation of legal remedies against it is exposed through literature review, primary data obtained from 18 roads and 10 public building projects, and interviews of 10 key informants. The result showed, although time is not the essence of construction contract in international standard conditions of contracts, it is a fundamental obligation the breach of which would give rise to termination of the contract under the laws and standard conditions of contracts applicable to public works in Ethiopia. However, the paper established that the practical implantation of these legal remedies against time overrun in public construction projects is very erratic although time overrun is a rampant challenge of the construction industry of the country in general and public construction projects in particular.
