Prioritising Building Supervision Contract Challenges for Balanced Contract Reform in Developing Countries: A Fuzzy Delphi–SIWEC Approach

Building supervision contracts in developing-country systems often give the supervisor wide residual liability while leaving fee, attendance and site authority thin. Lists of those difficulties are already available. A body that issues a standard form cannot open every clause at once, and an unweighted inventory does not say which failure should take the first revision. This paper treats that ranking task as the research problem and uses Iran as the empirical setting. To identify the challenges under uncertain expert language, and then to weight them without a large pairwise matrix, the study combines a three-round Delphi with fuzzy aggregation of the final scores and the simple weight calculation (SIWEC) method. Fifteen specialists completed the panel. Final-round ratings were converted to triangular fuzzy numbers and screened at Dj≥3.5. Twenty-seven challenges in five dimensions were identified. Twenty-five items met the threshold. C9 (Dj=3.467) and C10 (Dj=3.400) were kept as borderline cases. SIWEC weights from 81 valid responses (73.6%) placed legal and contractual issues first (0.237), followed by technical and executive (0.231) and managerial issues (0.227). Contextual challenges (0.158) and professional ethics (0.147) followed. Leading items were secondary occupation (0.1344), safety negligence (0.1731), false certification (0.3455), weak documentation (0.2419) and income erosion (0.4179). The contribution is a short drafting sequence for the standard appointment: five clauses and four attributes of a more balanced contract. The ranks measure perceived importance. They do not identify causes.