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Economically, Malaysia has one of the fastest growing construction industries in the world; however, the necessary balance between socio-economic and ecological systems – to avoid further environmental damage – has not yet been reached by the industry. This paper aims to explore the extent of sustainable development practices (socially, environmentally and economically) in the Malaysian construction industry, focusing on the office building sector.

Semi-structured in-depth interviews with 30 stakeholders from various backgrounds of the Malaysian construction industry are used to explore their challenges and motivations for pursuing sustainable outcomes.

The study finds that economic issues are the first priorities among stakeholders in any decision-makings for building projects and cost becomes one of the major reasons for the slow progress in implementing sustainable practices in building projects. Socially, there is still a wide gap of knowledge and awareness on sustainability issues among stakeholders, explaining the lack of commitment in achieving sustainability.

The sample size is only adequate to enable internal generalisation; hence, further research is required to test the generalisability of the findings in this research.

This paper informs the government and regulatory stakeholders, research and education sector, private sector, and clients of the building industry, where the authors currently are and the gaps that the authors have to bridge in order to make sustainability more socially acceptable and integral in the local construction industry.

There have been very limited studies on exploring the views from various groups of stakeholders regarding all the three components of sustainable development in the Malaysian construction industry.

The increasing global concerns about the environmental degradation and climate changes oblige architecture students to apply sustainable design approaches in their studio projects. Therefore, renewable energy raises the expectation of providing sustainable solutions for their architectural design proposals. This paper aims to investigate the learning of students in knowledge, awareness and applicability on sustainability during their first three years of the part 1 architecture programme. Surveys were conducted on 500 students from eight architecture schools from the local universities, two architecture schools from the polytechnic colleges and three architectural schools from the overseas universities. These survey results from 335 respondents confirmed that the learning on sustainability through self (51.6%), peer (48.6%) and design studio lecturers (37.0%). These results confirmed also that most respondents did rely on pre-design assessments to develop sustainable design strategies in their final architectural design proposals. These results concluded that the perception of architecture students on learning sustainability is based mainly on other sources. These findings provide knowledge for educationists and practitioners towards the planning of architecture curriculum and the implementation of pedagogical approach in sustainability. This paper determines the most important source of learning on sustainability knowledge for students in the pedagogy at university level.

As one of the fastest growing countries in the Middle East, and the one most vulnerable to climate change, the main challenge now facing Iran today is how to house its growing population in a socially, economically, and environmentally sustainable way. However, in the absence of a national framework to guide the sustainable development of the built environment, responding to this challenge is problematic. The articulation of a comprehensive assessment method that would enable issues of sustainability to be addressed and incorporated within building construction projects is urgently required. The research that underpins this paper takes account of current tools in aiming to support the development of a national building sustainability assessment method (BSAM) for use in Iran that involves the identification of sources of impact, specific benchmarks, and priorities for a weighting system for assessment criteria. This paper profiles the basis of a contextual framework that will inform the development of such a regional-based tool, taking account of Iran’s current climate change adaptation policies and priorities, its environmental conditions and socio-economic challenges, building typologies, standards and benchmarks.