Abstract:

Construction projects face a number of challenges related to variations, uncertainties, delays, cost overruns, and dissatisfaction from the users, resulting in conflicts. Arguably, there are more contractual conflicts in construction compared to tort, employment, procurement, and environmental conflicts. Despite the existence of Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) mechanisms, contractors and clients often proceed to litigation. There is limited research regarding the use of litigation to resolve contractual conflicts as compared to ADR techniques. Therefore, this research explores the use of litigation to establish the actual causes, time taken, and damages awarded based on real court cases, unlike most studies that use questionnaires giving experiences, impressions, perceptions, and opinions of practitioners. The research relied on published court cases by government organizations or institutions that were analyzed using R software. The search strategy resulted in 64 contract-related court cases that were resolved by the judicial system between 2000 and 2023. These contractual conflicts were broadly categorized as payment-related conflicts (48%), breach of contract (41%), and other contract issues (11%). The overall winning rate for plaintiffs in contractual conflicts is 90.6%. The findings show that the main causes of contractual conflicts in the construction industry are non-payment, breach of contract, delays and defective work. Non-payment is responsible for over 50% of the contractual conflicts in the construction industry. The average court-awarded special damages in contractual conflicts were USD 85,000 and USD 18,000 for general damages. Contractual conflicts in the construction industry take an average of 39.6 months to be resolved, with payment-related conflicts taking the least time (35 months). Therefore, based on the judicial target and lead time for all court cases in Uganda, the judicial system appears inefficient in resolving contractual conflicts in the construction industry given the lengthy lead time.