4.1. Ranking Analysis of the Complete Sample
The descriptive statistical analysis of the complete samples, including means, standard deviation (SD), and the ranking of the barriers that hamper GCTs implementation and its Kendall coefficient of concordance are illustrated in
Table 5. The mean scores of the importance of the barriers range from 2.95–4.15. Barriers with mean scores lager than or equal to 3.50 were perceived as critical barriers preventing GCT application. Survey results indicate that 16 out of the 21 potential barriers are critical factors. Among them, “B16-Lack of government incentives” (mean = 4.15) was ranked as the most critical obstacle hindering GCT implementation in the Chinese construction market. “B6-Extra costs associated with GCTs” (mean = 4.01) was ranked as the second most critical obstacle, followed by “B15-Dependence of traditional construction technology” as the third (mean = 4.00). The fourth- and fifth-ranked barriers were “B14-A shortage of technological trainings for project staff” (mean = 3.93) and “B20-Conflicts of interest among stakeholders in GCTs adoption” (mean = 3.90), respectively. From the survey results, “B2-Imperfect GC technological codes and standards”, “B7-Project delay caused by implementation of GCTs”, “B4-Low compatibility with other construction technologies”, “B12-Lack of environmental protection awareness among technicians”, and “B8-Incremental risk and uncertainties associated with GCT adoption”, with mean values less than 3.50, were regarded as noncritical barriers. The Kendall’s coefficient for ranking the 21 barriers was 0.106, and the significance level was 0.000, which shows a reasonable agreement on the ranking of obstacles impacting GCT implementation among all respondents. The top five barriers are discussed below.
“Lack of government incentives” (B16) was ranked as the most critical barrier hindering the GTC adoption. This finding is similar to previous studies concerning the adoption of OSC in China [
31], the implementation of GBTs in Ghana [
1], and the application of energy technology in China [
34], where lack of government incentives was deemed the most prominent barrier or the second most important barrier. Currently in China, although a few policy incentives encouraging GCT adoption exist, they are far from sufficient. There is a perception that government, acting as a “motor”, should play a more active role to speed up GCT adoption by making effective incentive policies. Implementing GCTs can bring environmental and social benefits, but additional costs caused by GCTs means profit losses to construction stakeholders. If incentive policies cannot offset the additional costs, accompanied by lack of knowledge of GCTs and their benefits, developers and contractors may hesitate to adopt GCTs in their construction projects. To accelerate the application of GCTs, government departments need to provide adequate incentive programs, including both financial incentives (e.g., subsidies) and nonfinancial incentives (e.g., more opportunities to be a demonstration project), especially in the early stage of the adoption of GCTs.
“Extra costs associated with GCTs” (B6) was ranked second among all the 21 barriers. This finding is similar to the numerous previous studies [
1,
13,
14,
21,
39] where the higher cost was identified as one of top three barriers that hamper green practice adoption. The cost of GCTs is much higher than traditional construction technologies [
48]. For example, if saving water technologies are adopted during construction process, extra costs must be paid for water-saving apparatus, reclaimed water treatment system, and collection of untraditional sources of water, such as that from foundation pit dewatering. In construction industry, cost is always the greatest concern for each participant when deciding whether to adopt new technologies and new norms [
12]. The comprehensive benefits consisting of environmental, social, and economic benefits produced by GCT adoption are not only for the clients and contractors, but also for each stakeholder, including residents around the project. Nevertheless, clients and contractors have to pay for all the additional cost involved in GCT applications, which results in a loss of profit. Therefore, the willingness to adopt GCTs is low. As the incentive policies are implemented, and knowledge and awareness of GCT benefits are improved, the cost obstacles may be overcome to some degree.
The barrier “Dependence of traditional construction technology” (B15) occupied the third position. This finding coincides with the previous research with regard to the barriers impacting OSC in China conducted by Mao et al. [
31], where dependence of traditional construction technology was also identified as the third most important barrier. However, the finding is not aligned with the previous study concerning the factors hindering green building adoption in Vietnam [
39], where reluctance to adopt changes was ranked low. GCTs belong to one kind of green innovation in construction industry, which was notorious for its slow innovation process and path dependency [
18]. Productivity, quality, and product functionality of the construction industry were relatively poor in contrast with that of other industries [
49]. Therefore, traditional technologies will keep their superior counterparts from taking off, which is known as the “lock-in” phenomenon [
13]. Contractors are not familiar with how to use GCTs, and this is accompanied by uncertainties and risks; besides, other barriers discussed in this study such as lack of government incentives, high costs, and a lack of demonstration projects, therefore they may be willing to choose traditional construction technology rather than GCTs.
Another important barrier was “a shortage of technological trainings for project staff” (B14) (ranked fourth), resulting in lack of knowledge relating GCT application, which was also deemed a barrier to GCTs. However, lack of training was not considered as one of the major barriers impacting the adoption of green practice adoption in many previous studies [
12,
13,
34,
50], and was ranked low in the studies on the obstacles preventing green building technology implementation in the US [
2] and in Ghana [
1]. According to this finding, it can be asserted that the number of contractors who are skilled in GCTs is limited. Without sufficient training for new technologies, project staff have to either learn how to use them themselves or apply them incorrectly. This consumes a lot of money and time, which decreases contractors’ willingness to adopt GTCs. If project staff can gain more training before applying GCTs so they understand what to do when they encounter technical difficulties, be it from the government or their organization, the application of GCTs will accelerate in China.
“Conflicts of interests among stakeholders in GCTs adoption” (B20) occupied the fifth position. This is in contrast with the previous survey conducted by Chan et al. [
1], where conflicts among stakeholders was ranked as one of the last three obstacles hampering GBT application. Meanwhile, it is worth noting that this barrier was not perceived as a critical factor hindering green technologies application in construction industry, such as energy-saving technologies [
34], prefabricated construction [
13] and extensive green roof systems [
37]. Based on this finding, “Conflicts of interests among stakeholders in GCTs adoption” is a critical barrier to the application of GCTs, which should not be overlooked. Many problems in construction industry resulted from interest conflicts among stakeholders of construction projects, and barriers to GCT implementation are no exception. For example, the purposes of establishing corporate image and improving the possibility of being a demonstration project drive the contractor to apply GCTs, but the client pays more attention to the objectives of project quality, costs, and the schedule; thus, they do not give sufficient support or cooperate with the contractor. Such conflicts of interest may prevent GCT application. It could be crucial for GCT penetration that government policies concerning GCTs take the various stakeholders’ interests into consideration.
4.2. Comparitive Analysis among Stakeholders
As discussed above, “Conflicts of interests among stakeholders in GCTs adoption” is a critical barrier to GCT application, so different stakeholders with different interests may hold divergent opinions on GCT application. Because the samples from clients were relatively small, consultants are entrusted by clients, and they can represent their interests. Therefore, responses from clients and consultants were grouped together in this study. Thus, all respondents were divided into two groups: contractors (group 1) and other stakeholders consisting of clients and consultants (group 2). The views of the two groups on what prevents GCT implementation in Chinese construction industry are illustrated in
Table 5.
As for the top five barriers, although their specific values and rankings were different, four of them identified by the two groups were the same: “Lack of government incentives” (B16), “Extra costs associated with GCTs” (B6), “Dependence of traditional construction technology” (B15), and “A shortage of technological trainings for project staff” (B14). This result is consistent with the analysis result of the whole sample. The one left of the top five barriers in group 1 was “Conflicts of interests among stakeholders in GCTs adoption” (B20), and in group 2 it was “Lack of importance attached to GC by owner” (B19). Contractors and other stakeholders (clients and consultants) hold almost the same opinions on the top five critical barriers hampering GCT application, and the results within the total sample were credible and reliable.
The Mann–Whitney U test was further employed to find whether there is any significant difference between the two groups’ evaluations on the importance of each barrier. The test results are demonstrated in
Table 6. The four barriers, which are “Dependence of traditional construction technology” (B15), “Lack of environmental protection awareness among organization managers working for contractors” (B10), “Lack of environmental protection awareness among technicians” (B12), and “Senior managers working for contractors pay insufficient attention on GCTs adoption” (B9), have significant differences between the two groups at the 5% significance level. They are all related to contractors’ awareness, attitudes, and behaviors. In addition, it is interesting to note that respondents from group 1 perceived the four barriers less important than group 2. Particularly, the differences between the ranks of the barrier B10 given by the two groups were quite high: group 1 ranked B10 19th, with a low average score of 3.29, while group 2 ranked it 6th, with an average score of 3.86. The mean scores of B10 and B12 were less than 3.30 within group 1, while they were higher than 3.6 within group 2. This indicated that contractors did not believe that their environmental protection awareness was poor, and as a result, the factors B10 and B12 were not ranked by them as the critical factors preventing GCT adoption. For other stakeholders’, B10 and B12 were the main barriers. A possible explanation is that during the promotion of sustainable construction by government in recent years, contractors’ awareness and emphasis on environmental protection improved gradually, whereas other stakeholders lack sufficient communication with contractors on environmental protection issues.
4.3. Comparison Analysis with Other Green Practices
To provide valuable insights into developing targeted policies for promoting the application of GCTs, the top five barriers to GCT adoption in China were compared with that of GBT adoption in Ghana, as identified by Chan et al. [
1] (study A), and that of GC in China, according to Shi et al. [
12] (study B). The reasons these two previous studies were chosen as comparison targets are that GBTs and GC are highly related to GCTs, and although the latter study was conducted in Ghana, it is as a developing country similar to China. The rankings of the top five GCT adoption barriers in these two related studies are shown in
Table 7. The barriers that were not identified as the barriers to the green practice adoption in the selected studies are marked with the symbol “-”.
The results in
Table 7 present that the barrier “Extra costs associated with green practice adoption” (B6) is the only barrier found in the top five positions of all three studies. This indicates that extra costs involved in green practice adoption is not only the top barrier preventing the GCTs adoption, but also the most critical barrier prohibiting GBT and GC adoption in developing countries. As declared by Shi et al. [
12], cost is always the biggest concern for each participant when deciding whether to adopt new technologies and new norms in the construction industry. Reducing the cost of green practice adoption by way of innovation and applying the method of Value Engineering can be greatly helpful to the promotion of green practice application. In addition, “lack of government incentives” was ranked as one of the top five barriers to the adoption of both GCTs in our study and GBTs in study A, but not regarded as a barrier to GC in study B.
“Dependence of traditional construction technology”, “A shortage of technological trainings”, and “Conflicts of interest among stakeholders in GCTs adoption” were not in the top five barriers to adoption of GBTs and GC in studies A and B. Although these three were identified as barriers to GBTs, their ranks are very different from those of the barriers to GCTs. Taking the barrier “Conflicts of interest among stakeholders in GCTs adoption” for example, it was ranked fifth in our study, while it ranked very low (24th) in study A. These three barriers were not mentioned in the context of GC application in study B.
The results of comparative analysis prove that the most important barriers to GCT adoption are quite different from those of GBTs and GC application in developing countries, which further demonstrates the necessity and importance of identifying and understanding the most prominent obstacles hindering the adoption of specific objects of GCTs. A possible explanation is that although GCTs, GBTs, and GC are highly correlated, their characteristics, scopes, applying stage, and adoption decision-makers are different. For example, the decision on whether to adopt GCTs is made in the construction stage, mainly by the contractor, while the decision on whether to adopt GBTs is made in the design stage by the developer. As mentioned above, compared with GC, GCTs mainly relate to the technology factor of GC, exclusive of the works of organization and coordination during the process of green construction.