Muhammad Mubasher

The construction sector is central to the European Green Deal (EGD) yet faces persistent obstacles in transitioning toward circular, low-carbon practices. This study conducts a qualitative content analysis of 101 EGD-related policy documents to systematically identify implementation barriers and map them across key stakeholder groups. Four barrier categories emerge (financial, institutional, legal and administrative, and technical) yielding 390 coded references. Six stakeholder groups are identified with 665 references, with EU institutions, national governments, local authorities, private sector actors, civil society and NGOs, and research and academia exhibiting distinct exposure profiles. A stakeholder–barrier heatmap highlights asymmetric transition pressures, showing particularly high cumulative exposure for SMEs and local authorities, and predominantly governance- and regulation-related challenges for EU and national institutions. The findings provide an evidence-based framework for targeting support measures and informing the design of forthcoming empirical research that will directly engage stakeholders to validate and deepen these insights.

The construction sector is central to achieving the objectives of the European Green Deal (EGD). While existing research on transition risks predominantly focuses on project- or firm-level challenges, less is known about the transition risks implied by high-level EU policy documents. This study addresses this gap by systematically analysing 101 EGD-related policy and guidance documents published between 2019 and February 2025. A mixed human–AI content analysis approach was applied, combining human expert manual coding with automated validation using large language models (Kimi K2 and GLM 4.6). The final dataset contains 2752 coded risk references organised into eight main categories and twenty-six subcategories. Results show that transition risks are most frequently associated with environmental, economic, and legislative domains, with Climate Change Impact, Cost of Transition, Pollution, Investment Risks, and Implementation Variability emerging as the most prominent risks across the corpus. Technological and social risks appear less frequently but highlight important systemic and contextual vulnerabilities. Overall, analysis of the EGD policy texts reveals the green transition as being constrained not only by environmental pressures but also by financial feasibility and execution capacity. The study provides a structured, policy-level risk profile of the EGD and demonstrates the value of hybrid human–LLM analysis for large-scale policy content analysis and interpretation. These insights support policymakers and industry stakeholders to anticipate structural uncertainties that may affect the construction sector’s transition toward a low-carbon, circular economy.