Built Environment Project and Asset Management

ISSN: 2044-124X

Issue 4.1 Contents: Vol. 4 Issue 1

Editorial
Mohan Kumaraswamy

Stakeholders’ expectations in utilising financial models for public private partnership projects
Fredy Kurniawan , Stephen Ogunlana, Ibrahim Motawa

Cross Sectoral Comparison of Concessions in Transport: Urban, Road and Port Pre-Fuzzy Assessment
Thierry Vanelslander, Gilles Chomat, Athena Roumboutsos, Géraldine Bonnet

A Game Theoretic Model for Roadway Performance Management: A Socio-Technical Approach
Hesham Osman, Mazdak Nikbakht

Value Methodology in Public Engagement for Construction Development Projects
Mei-yung Leung, Jingyu Yu

Overview of the Development and Implementation of the Mandatory Building Inspection Scheme (MBIS) in Hong Kong
Daniel W.M. Chan, Henry T.W. Hung, Albert P.C. Chan, Tony K.K. Lo

Embracing sustainability practices in UK construction organizations: challenges facing intra-organizational leadership
Alex Opoku, Vian Ahmed

Potential and implications of sustainability action plans: lessons from the Greater Middlehaven Regeneration Project
Craig Thomson, Mohamed El-Haram

BEPAM Editorial 4.1

SPREADING WINGS AND SOARING HIGHER

Time flies, and it seems we can too, at least in some ways! Time-wise, we are already into Volume 4 of BEPAM, while trajectory-wise, with an encouraging succession of recent achievements, the above caption appears to be an apt sequel to my last editorial caption of ‘Joining Hands and Advancing Together’.

Recent milestones passed in the BEPAM journey, include successful indexing in SCOPUS, being conferred ‘CIB encouraged’ status and thirdly, receiving the ‘B’ rating that we applied for in the widely respected Australian journals rating system managed by the Australian Business Deans Council. Many have conveyed that since BEPAM is a relatively young journal, we should be very happy with this outcome, given the strict criteria applied. Of course all these achievements energise us even further, in building on this momentum to aim higher.

Increasing to 4 issues per year from Volume 4, helps BEPAM in ‘spreading wings’ further and is indeed a natural progression from the recent volumes, where we accommodated more papers than planned, in scheduled issues. Another ‘spread’ dimension is seen in our catchment and target areas – for example, BEPAM 3.2 being a Special Issue on ‘PPP in Transport: Theory and Practice’ brought on board a wider group of stakeholders with special interests in PPP in transport. While our Guest Editors were from Greece and Portugal, they attracted papers from many countries worldwide, as expected. We congratulate the Guest Editors and the authors for their significant contributions in advancing knowledge on this increasingly critical theme.

Indeed, such special issues enable us to ‘drill deeper’ or ‘soar higher’ depending on one’s perspective. With Emerald encouragement as well, we have commenced work on two more Special Issues: one on ‘Project Management and Asset Management in Emerging Economies’; and the other on ‘Leadership, Culture and Sustainable Built Environment’. While the theme of the former indicates a deliberate ‘spread’ to emerging economies, this is reinforced by the positioning and networks of the Guest Editors in East Asia (Singapore) and (South America (Brazil). The specific ‘spread’ of the other special issue to link the ‘leadership’ and ‘culture’ domains, with the ‘sustainability’ agenda that is also a cornerstone of BEPAM, signifies another relevant ‘reaching out’ exercise. This is under the able guidance of Guest Editors based in Cambridge and Salford, UK, with extensive worldwide networks themselves. Our next Special Issue, with Guest Editors from Australia and the UK and including one well positioned practitioner, will be on 'BIM for Built Asset Management' (BIM for BAM), bearing additional testimony to the topicality and value of the BEPAM mission, in linking the different phases in a built asset life cycle.

Shifting our focus to the current issue, rather than paraphrase or second-guess the principal thrusts of the published papers which may be better identified from their abstracts, I only aim to briefly indicate some relevant connections and common threads, running across this 4.1 issue. Indeed some threads weave through into previous BEPAM issues as may be discerned from the ‘Table of Contents’ in http://www.emeraldinsight.com/products/journals/journals.htm?id=bepam. For example, those interested in specific areas like PPP (public private partnership) or PE (public engagement), would be able to skim through for at least an overview of how different dimensions of these domains were explored before.

In this issue for example, the first and second papers are on PPP and they complement each other, with the first (by Kurniawan , Ogunlana and Motawa) exploring what stakeholders expect from PPP financial models in general, while the second (by Vanelslander, Chomat, Roumboutsos and Bonnet) probes concessions across three specific transport sub-sectors in Europe. The third paper (by Osman and Nikbakht), while also looking at transport, focuses on roadway performance management applying a game-theoretic approach to model stakeholder interactions with an example from Canada. The stakeholder management thread continues in the fourth paper (by Leung and Yu) with a goal of boosting public engagement processes and outcomes (during the upstream asset development phase) through value methodology. The fifth paper (by Chan, Hung, Chan and Lo), like the fourth, is based in Hong Kong, but is focused on a downstream (in terms of asset life) ‘mandatory building inspection scheme’. The sixth paper (by Opoku and Ahmed) focuses on built asset life in terms of sustainability practices in the UK, but interestingly injects ‘leadership’ into the equation, also differentiating it from the usual sustainability mantras. The sustainability thread continues through the seventh paper (by Thomson and El-Haram), specifically spotlighting ‘sustainability action plans’ and lessons from a regeneration project, also in the UK.  

If you are reading this last paragraph, even if you bypassed some above, I expect you may have at least some interest in BEPAM”s onward and upward journey and I hope you may appreciate and if at all possible, contribute to our special mission in linking the planning, design and construction of built assets to their operation, maintenance and downstream management. I also hope that we can spread the benefits that are accruing from this special mission as soon and as widely as possible, in developing and boosting both the underlying principles and good practices.

Mohan Kumaraswamy

Editor-in-Chief