Associate Professor of Law, Department of the Built Environment, 
College of Design and Engineering, National University of Singapore

This article considers the advent of collaborative contracting in Singapore. The author discusses the innovative path taken by the Singapore Building and Construction Authority which is bifurcated into two distinct tracks – a light-touch approach to collaborative contracting via the use of a Singaporean “option module” on the one hand and the full collaborative approach by utilising the New Engineering Contract – in particular the NEC4 Engineering and Construction Contract on the other. Lessons learnt from BCA’s simultaneous twin approaches may be useful for other jurisdictions elsewhere which may be considering the use of collaborative contracting in their built environment sectors.

This article considers the advent of collaborative contracting in Singapore. The author discusses the innovative path taken by the Building and Construction Authority (“BCA”) which is bifurcated into two distinct tracks – 
a light-touch approach to collaborative contracting via the use of an “option module” and the full collaborative approach by utilising the NEC4 Engineering and Construction Contract (“ECC”). Lessons learnt from the simultaneous twin approaches taken by BCA may be useful for other jurisdictions which may be considering the use of collaborative contracting in their built environments. The concurrent use and development of the two approaches underpin BCA’s commitment to drive collaborative contracting in the Singapore construction industry by encouraging stakeholders of all levels of knowledge and risk appetites to practise collaborative contracting in their projects. The policy position appears to be that collaborative contracting should not be seen as something “highbrow” or only available to stakeholders of a certain financial capacity or sophistication and that collaboration takes many forms and there is no single contractual arrangement that must be used.