Contractor-Led Stakeholder Relationship Management in Construction Projects

This book offers a contractor-led framework for managing stakeholder relationships in construction projects where delays, disputes, cost escalation, and abandonment are often rooted in relational breakdown rather than technical failure alone. Grounded in Botswana's construction industry but written for wider developing-country and complex project contexts, it shows how contractors can become central relational integrators across clients, regulators, consultants, subcontractors, suppliers, communities, and end users.

The book addresses a persistent problem in construction management: conventional stakeholder management models are often client-centric, static, and compliance-driven, yet construction projects are dynamic relationship systems in which stakeholder influence, expectations, and risks shift throughout delivery.

The book integrates stakeholder theory, relational contracting, social network thinking, maturity-based relationship management, and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) theory. It explains why CRM's emphasis on lifecycle relationships, feedback, responsiveness, trust, and organizational learning can be translated into construction project governance. The book also responds to contemporary concerns by reassessing the CSRMF in light of COVID-19-era disruptions, supply-chain volatility, digitalization, nationalism and internationalization pressures, and the growing influence of AI and blockchain-enabled smart contracts.

A major contribution of the book is its movement from diagnosis to implementation and evaluation. It first analyzes stakeholder relationship failures in Botswana, then evaluates existing stakeholder relationship management models, develops a CRM-informed governance logic, identifies success conditions for contractor-led relationship management, presents the final CSRMF, explains how the framework can be enacted in practice, and evaluates contractor performance through stakeholder perspectives.

The book is intended for construction management researchers, postgraduate students, contractors, project managers, clients, consultants, regulators, policymakers, professional bodies, and built-environment practitioners concerned with improving project outcomes through more systematic stakeholder relationship management.