Navigating Green Building Policies and Incentives: A PRISMA Systematic Review of Trends, Mechanisms, Barriers, and Strategies

Green building incentives constitute a policy instrument for mitigating economic, technical, and behavioral barriers to the adoption of green buildings, yet existing studies remain fragmented across incentive types, stakeholders, and building life cycle stage. A coherent synthesis that explains how incentive strategies evolve and interact across these dimensions is still missing. This study addresses that gap through a systematic literature review guided by the PRISMA 2020 protocol. A total of 69 peer-reviewed journal articles published between 2016 and 2025 were identified from Scopus and analyzed using thematic synthesis. The review maps temporal trends, incentive typologies, stakeholder roles, and implementation challenges across different regional and market contexts. The findings indicate that incentive effectiveness depends on alignment between life cycle stage, market maturity, and stakeholder capacity, rather than on any single policy instrument. Financial incentives remain critical in early market phases, while non-financial and regulatory instruments gain prominence as markets mature. The synthesis also demonstrates how evolutionary game theory has been increasingly applied to analyse dynamic incentive and penalty strategies under bounded rationality, offering a structured lens for adaptive policy design. By integrating life cycle perspectives, stakeholder interactions, and game theoretical insights, this study advances current understanding of these incentive designs. The results provide a foundation for more adaptive and context-sensitive incentive frameworks and identify clear directions for future empirical and comparative policy research.