Sustainable Responses to Minimise Recessionary Effects in the Sri Lankan Construction Industry

The construction industry is concurred a positive relationship with the cyclical economic fluctuations. Thus, the adverse economic conditions associated with the recession directly affect the construction industry. In response to the recession, the construction practitioners adopt various strategies, but many survival strategies have become reactive, which only consider the short-term economic perspectives. Therefore, the need arises for proactive strategies which focus on the long termism, while the ad-hoc selection of strategies during recession is inappropriate. Therefore, the aim of this research is to map the proactive sustainable responses to the adverse recessionary effects and the scope of the study is limited to the Sri Lankan context. The current research study follows a pragmatic knowledge claim which uses pluralistic approaches to focus on the research problem. In the preceding study, a questionnaire survey was conducted among a sample of 35. The sample size can be generalised due to the time constraint while non-probabilistic snowballing sampling technique is used due to the unknown population. In order to accomplish the aim of this research paper, the authors conducted an expert interview survey from approximately one third (12/35) of the respondents in the questionnaire survey. The purpose of conducting a qualitative study among a known sample is to elaborate their perspective in the subject area which further explores the findings generated from the closed structured questionnaire box. The results revealed critical adverse effects and sustainable responses during recessions. A recession responses map illustrated that the sustainable responses can be used to gain an advantage over recession. ‘Risk analysis and Contingency planning’ proactively mitigates most of the adverse effects. The recession responses have been mainly focused on two adverse effects: ‘Liquidity of firms unstable’ and ‘Worsened profitability of construction firms’. Moreover, the attitude of accepting the risk was eliminated with null consideration. The findings of this research are relevant to all the stakeholders in preparing themselves for market volatility during recession.