Strengthening Building Code Implementation and Compliance in the Developing World: a Case Study of Nepal

Abstract eng:
The April 2015 Gorkha Nepal earthquake and subsequent aftershocks revealed the relative effectiveness of the country’s National Building Code (NBC) and irregular compliance with it in different parts of Nepal. The prevalence of owner-built structures in the country meant that few residential structures, especially those outside Kathmandu Valley, were constructed with any formal professional engineering design or supervision. Tens of thousands of buildings collapsed or were severely damaged as a result of the Gorkha earthquake sequence, leading to the mammoth task of rebuilding and recovery. Such a situation underscores the need for a suitable mechanism to direct and govern construction standards and best practices of resilient construction. Ultimately, this mechanism should help to achieve the goal of reaching areas of the developing world where the majority of new construction will be built in this century. The NBC, developed following the 1988 earthquake in the NepalIndia border region and published in 1994, covers the most common building types in Nepal. The NBC has a tiered code structure that requires stringent engineering supervision for both international state-of-the-art buildings and very tall and complex buildings. For low- or mid-rise buildings and those that are located in rural areas, the NBC only states Mandatory Rules of Thumb or Guidelines to be followed by local masons and craftsmen. In this paper, we share preliminary results of a two-year project by the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute’s Housner Fellows Program (a leadership and advocacy training program) focused on understanding and communicating a path toward increased building code compliance and enforcement in Nepal. We describe some issues associated with implementation of the NBC, along with global best practices for building code compliance drawn from the literature. We discuss how this information served as the foundation for workshops conducted in three municipalities in Nepal representing various levels of building code implementation. The workshops, held in February 2016, included a broad selection of stakeholders, from the ministerial level to local masons. Participants were invited to share their experiences with designing and implementing initiatives at the local level. The workshops’ goals were twofold: (1) to communicate best practices from Haiti, Pakistan, and New Zealand for increasing building code compliance, and (2) to encourage and enable dialogue among the workshop participants on local conditions and potential means of increasing building code awareness and compliance. Finally, we elaborate on lessons learned and key observations for each of the participating municipalities. It is our hope that this summary of our literature review and preliminary findings from our field-based investigations will facilitate future efforts toward improving building code compliance in Nepal and other developing countries around the globe.

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