The first and second articles can be seen as a contrast between the movement in the UK towards a contract designed to avoid over-complication and be expressed in simple language (the new engineering contract) which departs from many traditional concepts enshrined in the ICE forms, and the FIDIC contract which still owes its origins to those ICE forms. It is interesting that the NEC form for use in the UK incorporates an express term of good faith, a concept not recognised by the common law and the FIDIC contract for use internationally, in many cases in civil law jurisdictions, does not. The FIDIC contracts do not expressly require the parties to act in good faith towards each other, although cooperation to achieve the contractual obligation is assumed, but may be subject to civil law jurisdictions where good faith is a guiding principle.

In the first article discussing the changes introduced by the new edition of the engineering contract (NEC4) the authors, Nicholas Downing, David Nitek and Michael Mendelblat note the move in the domestic UK industry towards a more collaborative approach. The article is however concerned with the changes made to the individual provisions of NEC4 and the motivation for those changes. One of the problems of managing an NEC contract is the need to update the programme to reflect adjustments for compensation events in order to assess the impact in real time of subsequent events. This is discussed under the heading in the article “Compensation Events”, and the authors note the (relatively modest) changes that have been made to clauses 60 to 66, and the change that the assessment of the project manager is now to be made by reference to the “accepted programme current at the dividing date” (clause 63.5). This assumes that the accepted programme represents current progress. Another important change is to termination for convenience which has now become a secondary option at (X11). One feature of the original NEC suite of contracts was the relative simplicity of the language used and the broad nature of some of the obligations created. This gave the opportunity to the parties, operating collaboratively, to resolve difficulties during the progress of the project if they were so minded. The contract conditions were not as hard edged as the traditional forms attempted to be and so the parties were left with an area for interpretation, which given the relatively novel nature of the form and the lack of authoratitive guidance as to the meaning of those provisions