Abstract: Incentive mechanism is increasingly used to promote the construction management of water conservancy projects. It is important how the owner applies incentives to the construction supervision of a water conservancy project for better project delivery. Most of the previous studies in the literature focused on the effect of a specific incentive measure on construction supervision, lacking a holistic study on different incentive measures with empirical evidence support. This paper constructs and verifies an incentive model for water conservancy project construction supervision (WCPCS) that is based on a survey of the Ningxia water conservancy project delivery, aimed at the current common problems and main influencing factors of the incentive mechanism in WCPCS in China. This model is used to reveal the interactions among incentive resources, incentive measures, incentive implementation, and incentive effect so as to improve the performance of WCPCS in China. We develop a performance evaluation and incentive implementation system of WCPCS. Incentive resources and incentive measures on the supervision need to be appropriately combined with learning, innovation, project process and project outcomes, so that the incentives can better guide construction supervision, create motivations for supervisors, and improve project performance. To improve the incentive effect of WCPCS, such measures should be taken, i.e., improving the supervision performance evaluation system, arranging sufficient resources in incentive schemes, and explicating construction supervision tasks and their priorities in incentive measures.

Key words: water conservancy, construction supervision, incentive mechanism, incentive effect