Greening Kenya’s Special Economic Zones and Industrial Parks: Achieving their Competitiveness in the face of Resource Scarcity and a Changing Climate Regime

Ground conditions constitute a key risk factor that can ultimately determine the successful performance of construction contracts, with the literature reporting statistics of projects which have significantly exceeded their initial budget due to geotechnical uncertainties. The study explores the nature of geotechnical risk factors in transportation infrastructure projects, which potentially lead to cost overruns. The study provides a kaleidoscopic view of the various routes to managing risks due to the ground, at the preconstruction phases of highway projects, and how a lack thereof, can culminate to determine the trend of high-cost overruns in highway projects. The study findings reveal arguments and widely contested issues in geotechnical practice, which to various degrees, can have a significant financial impact on project completion cost in highway projects. The findings uncover various error traps and gaps in practice such as the lack of deterministic costing methods that better reflect heterogeneous ground conditions; insufficiency of preliminary geotechnical exploration; poor geotechnical risk containment in contracts as well as non-deployment of multi-dimensional geotechnically bespoke contractor selection algorithm. The study submits that these gaps in practice constitute the various trajectories through which geotechnical risk can trigger inefficiency and wastage of financial resources, leading to cost overruns in transportation infrastructure projects.