The building industry: A black hole or a green spot for environmental policy?

Buildings are very important to human welfare as well as to sustainability. We live and work in buildings, and a lot of resources are spent on their design, construction, and maintenance. Thus, it is important to achieve a better understanding of buildings as socio-technical entities as well as shaping processes related to the building industry and building technologies. These shaping processes are quite complex, in their origin as well as in the way they are performed. In this paper, our focal point is public policy in the area of sustainable energy. The Norwegian government has in the past three decades tried various strategies to make the building industry interested in designing buildings that are more energy efficient, but with modest results. While the first efforts tried to address technological issues directly through investments and subsidies related to particular technologies, like heat pumps, policy has increasingly been grounded in market liberalism and the economists� belief in �cost-efficient instruments�. These efforts to provide �action at a distance� call for a critical examination. Our research shows that the building industry has been quite resistant to ideas about sustainability and energy conservation. The introduction of new energy technologies, new energy carriers and sustainable design have been shown to be much more difficult than assumed, due to an underestimation of the need to cope with cultural, political and industrial challenges within the industry. The research has also faulted the traditional idea about energy use as an issue of effective use of macro-political measures to influence micro behaviour. Instead, it can be shown that to facilitate sustainable energy consumption, an explicit focus on meso and micro relationships is needed. Thus, we need to understand the institutional arrangements and actors� strategies that decisively influence design, development, implementation and use of energy technologies. In this paper, we particularly want to highlight the problem of what we see as a peculiar low ambition regime in designing building and how this regime is characterised by a kind of lock-in between socio-cultural conditions, traditional technologies and particular micro-economic conditions. This implies an analysis of forces of stability versus forces of change, the translation problem from visions of sustainability to concrete political and technological actions, and the potential for appropriation of new system elements like new renewable energy sources and energy carriers. The paper addresses the problem of establishing efficient support system for the development and implementation of new sustainable energy technologies in the building trade. This problem may be seen as a traditional issue of providing an efficient innovation policy related to a specific area. The analysis will draw on a series of case studies related to sustainable architecture, HVAC engineers, heatpumps, implementation of new heating systems in buildings, and users of office buildings as well as an analysis of Norwegian energy policies.