Opportunities and challenges of compliance to safe building codes: Bangladesh and Nepal

This paper discusses the opportunities and challenges of compliance to safe building codes in Bangladesh and Nepal for increased disaster resilience. Recent disasters in both countries highlight that non-compliance to building codes is one of the significant causes of building-related disasters. Increased institutional and community awareness of the importance of safe building codes presents an opportunity to explore barriers and enablers to compliance. Building codes do exist in the two countries, but compliance is generally absent or limited, especially in the widespread informal building sector, which has restricted access to codes and little financial capacity to comply. The research undertaken is significant for two reasons: (1) disaster resilience is of high concern nationally in both Bangladesh and Nepal, where safe buildings are required to protect human lives and assets; and (2) the UN Sustainable Development Goals and Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, among others, emphasize the importance of building codes. The project was formulated with the aim of identifying pathways for facilitating voluntary compliance to safe building codes for disaster resilience in Bangladesh and Nepal. The research methodology included two main components: a comprehensive literature review to identify potential solutions and gaps in terms of disaster resilience; and semi-structured interviews, including focus group discussions with stakeholders around challenges and opportunities for facilitating voluntary compliance to safe building codes. The findings were analyzed to understand how building codes might be more widely adopted to enable disaster resilience. A key output of the research is a training handbook on safe construction relevant to the informal sector and produced in local languages of the two case study countries.