Hamza Ali Suleiman Alayaydeh
Standard types of construction contracts have been heavily marketed as ways of improving contractual certainty, enhancing risk sharing and contractual disputes in complex construction projects. Of these, the FIDIC contract terms are widely used in international and public works projects, including in emerging construction markets such as Jordan. This extensive standardization notwithstanding, it is evident that construction disputes still do emerge, and this begs the critical question of whether or not FIDIC contracts actually play the functional role they are supposed to in practice.This research paper empirically investigates the issue of whether the use of FIDIC contract conditions is mainly a preventative instrument of dispute or rather realistically a dispute management framework. It was decided to use a quantitative dominant mixed methods approach, relying on survey data which will be collected among 400 construction professionals engaged in major FIDIC based projects. The necessary quantitative data were analyzed with the help of the Statistical Package of the Social Sciences (SPSS) using descriptive statistics, Pearson correlation analysis, and the linear regression, and semi structured interviews were conducted to help in contextual interpretation of the statistical results. The findings show that the use of the FIDIC contract conditions is statistically related with the better results of the dispute related outcomes; still, its explanatory capacity is small when investigated in isolation. The regression analysis shows that there is a significant yet limited predictive relationship between contractual standardization alone and the occurrence of disputes. Qualitative insights also indicate that organizational behavior, contract administration practices, delayed activation of dispute adjudication mechanisms, and extensive contractual amendments have a decisive role in escalating disputes, even when formal reliance is made on FIDIC contracts.These results offer some empirical evidence to the differentiation between dispute prevention and dispute management in construction contracting. The paper finds that FIDIC contracts are used more as governance systems, which organize the processes to resolve disputes rather than as a guarantee of avoiding disputes. Combining a legal analysis with empirical engineering data, the study makes a contribution to the current scholarship in the area of construction law and dispute resolution and highlights the significance of the alignment of the contractual mechanisms with the effective project governance and institutional practice.