Many countries in Africa, Asia and South America have significant public building backlogs. Schools, colleges, clinics, and hospitals still need to be built and existing infrastructure has to be updated and refurbished. In addressing backlogs, there is the opportunity to develop more sustainable buildings and infrastructure.

However, frequently this prospect is not pursued, and the design and construction of public buildings continue to follow conventional methods. One reason for this, is that government, with limited capacity, prioritise their development priorities, and this leaves little scope to include additional ‘green building’ criteria and processes.

However, this assumes that government development priorities and green building criteria are not well aligned. It also assumes that applying green building tool criteria is difficult with limited capacity. This leads to some interesting questions:

• What are government development objectives? What are the implications of these for buildings and construction?
• What sort of criteria can be developed to ensure that government development objectives are integrated into the buildings they develop?
• What are criteria are used in green building rating tools?
• Is there alignment between the building criteria for government development objectives and green building rating tools?
• What does an investigation into these questions suggest for the development of a Government Sustainable Building Rating Tool?

These are the questions I tackled in my recent paper “A Government Sustainable Building Rating Tool” for the World Sustainable Built Environment 2024 conference. The papers are due to be published soon by IOP so will be available to read, if you are interested. Photograph: Bhekisisa.org