“Our aim is to make available a local sustainability rating system that reflects the Omani stakeholders’ perception, values and preferences with regarding to sustainability”

In spite of the efforts to adopt a sustainable built environment strategies in Oman, to our best knowledge, there is a lack of systematic and scientific studies that investigated Omani perception of sustainable built environment and their priorities for sustainability components.

It is true that there are several sustainability rating systems worldwide. However, we believe that such an important tool should reflect the perception of the local people through a comprehensive participation and co-creation process. Importing a non-local sustainability rating tool or system and imposing it to the Omani construction sector is likely to jeopardize the requirements of the local context, cultural requirements, and people priorities.

We believe that the term “sustainability” is still an ill-defined term as it could mean different things to different people in different situations, context and cultural settings. Therefore, our work was based on a bottom up approach aiming to elicit the Omani stakeholders’ perception of sustainable built environment and identify its components using the Social Constructionism Theory and Consensus Development Methods; and prioritize the elicited components in terms of their relative importance using a more advanced statistical data collection and analysis methodology.

We started with identifying and mapping the stakeholders in the Omani construction sector in order to make sure that all views are considered and incorporated. This was followed by an intensive elicitation process with a large sample of stakeholders using scientific methods to understand what makes a building sustainable from the Omani collective point of view. Representatives of stakeholder groups were then involved in interactive workshops that were designed to help the participants to develop consensus on sustainability categories and their indicators. This was followed by more advanced statistical analysis with a larger sample of Omani stakeholders to prioritize the categories resulted from the earlier stage.  These four interlinked steps have informed the development of HOSN.