Elsevier

Journal of Cleaner Production

Volume 211, 20 February 2019, Pages 281-292
Journal of Cleaner Production

Barriers inhibiting the transition to sustainability within the Australian construction industry: An investigation of technical and social interactions

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2018.11.166Get rights and content

Highlights

  • The Australian building industry suffers from a dysfunctional sustainability ecosystem.

  • Siloed vested interest groups exploit Australia's ineffective transition regime for their own gain.

  • Refining rating tools and modifying building practices are not sufficient.

  • End-users are confused, disenfranchised and unpersuaded of the benefits of sustainable buildings.

  • Residential property owners must be positively incentivised to make the transition.

Abstract

Research concedes that the building industry in Australia has fallen short of satisfying sustainability requirements. Currently, the responsibility for transitioning the building industry into one that is sustainable is laid largely at the feet of low-carbon governance instruments such as mandatory codes and sustainability rating tools. The behavior of groups, interactions of individual actors, relationship between actors' and group level behaviors that affect implementation of these instruments have, however, received only cursory attention. This study therefore seeks to move beyond the instruments debate and identify a broader range of factors inhibiting the transition to sustainability within the Australian building industry. It draws on focus group discussions held with 26 leading sustainability experts and practitioners from around the country. Whereas, earlier work on impediments to sustainability pre-identify potential causal factors, this study, with Sustainability Transition as the theoretical lens, allowing for new and as yet unidentified impediments to emerge. Indeed, while findings confirm a range of technical shortcomings hindering sustainability transition, the deeper barrier is shown to be the prevalence of a dysfunctional sustainability ecosystem where siloed vested interest groups exploit Australia's ineffective transition regimes for their own gain. The practical implication is that current efforts to refine rating tools and modify building practices – remedies identified in earlier research – will not be enough to effect meaningful transition, as long as end-users remain disenfranchised, confused and unpersuaded of the benefits of sustainable buildings.

Introduction

The construction, operation and maintenance of buildings in Australia account for around 25% of the nation's annual carbon emissions (van der Heijden, 2018). As Australia's population continues to grow, there will be a need for even more buildings. In 2017, around 18,000 dwelling units were approved for construction monthly (ABS, 2018){ABS, 2018 #601}{ABS, 2018 #601}{ABS, 2018 #601}{ABS, 2018 #601}{ABS, 2018 #601}{ABS, 2018 #601}{ABS, 2018 #601}{ABS, 2018 #601}. Melbourne will need another 720,000 homes by 2031 (Masanauskas, 2014); Sydney, another 664,000 new homes within 20 years (Foong et al., 2017). The number of residential units across Australia will reach 10 million by 2020, compared to just 6 million in 1990 (Saman, 2013). Against this backdrop, the sustainability phenomenon has taken on increased importance in recent years, and accordingly the demand for more sustainable buildings is on the rise (Martinaitis et al., 2015, Darko et al., 2017). Compounding this demand, the building industry is required to adopt practices and processes that produce buildings sustainably (Berardi, 2012). By definition, sustainable buildings are expected to minimize adverse impacts on the environment, enhance the living quality of their occupants and local community, while yet continuing to generate adequate profit for developers (Zuo and Zhao, 2014, Olubunmi et al., 2016).

‘Green building’ is a term that has been used interchangeably with ‘sustainable building’ and ‘high-performance building,’ which, as pointed out by Zuo and Zhao (2014), has generated some confusion. Nevertheless, the concept, however described, refers to a “minimization of impacts on the environment, enhancing the health conditions of occupants, the return on investment to developers and local community, and the life cycle consideration during the planning and development process.” (Zuo and Zhao, 2014, p. 272) In the context of moving towards sustainable buildings within Australia, sustainability rating tools (or, green rating tools) have emerged key enablers for producing sustainable buildings. Their use is voluntary, going beyond what is required of mandatory instruments, like the National Construction Code (NCC) (Olubunmi et al., 2016, Foong et al., 2017). Sustainability rating tools evaluate buildings and order them by rank, or rating. The rating imputed a building serves as a common language by which stakeholders are given to understand the building's level of adoption of sustainable practices (Gou and Xie, 2017, Li et al., 2017).

Despite the envisaged benefits of sustainability assessment tools, in reality, sustainability transitioning within the Australian building industry has yet to produce tangible positive results (Van der Heijden, 2016, Foong et al., 2017). This problem has been largely attributed to unfavorable social, regulatory, political, and instrumental realities (Smoleniec et al., 2017, van der Heijden, 2018, Wong et al., 2018). According to Yang and Yang (2015, p. 276):

“Despite the potential benefits and technological viability, voluntary uptake of sustainable housing is still in its infancy in Australia, mostly driven by motives of experimentation, showcasing and marketing.”

Clearly, ascertaining the factors—barriers—that are hindering Australia's shift towards adoption of sustainable buildings is timely and relevant (Yang and Yang, 2015). These barriers are largely affected by social dynamics (Foong et al., 2017); specifically, the interactions between individuals within groups, the interactions of individuals with respect to their group, and the interactions between groups (Durlauf and Young, 2001). Indeed, the social dynamics factors inhibiting wide-scale sustainability uptake remain under-researched (Foong et al., 2017, Kivimaa et al., 2017, Smoleniec et al., 2017, Warren-Myers et al., 2018). Mostly, previous studies, including the work by Hatvani-Kovacs et al. (2018), have identified significant problems, but tend to quantify aspects of the performance weakness of sustainability rating tools.

Of those studies moving beyond the tools dialogue, the focus tends to be narrow. Wong et al. (2018) examined property practitioners, while van der Heijden (2018) looked at the transferability of sustainability awareness from market leaders to mass consumers. As for Warren-Myers et al. (2018), their focus was limited to the consumers of voluntary sustainably certified residential developments.

This paper thus aims to identify the barriers that are thwarting the government's agenda for a ‘revolution’ towards sustainable buildings in Australia. It does so from a broad social dynamics perspective, where all the interacting elements of the system, reciprocal impacts, and their interrelations are incorporated in the study. Simply, the present study is overdue, since, in the absence of a full understanding of the extant barriers, a meaningful and genuine sustainability transition cannot be expected to find traction (Williams and Dair, 2007, Kivimaa et al., 2017).

The study goes beyond the extant literature in examining the issues affecting sustainability transition. It identifies and sheds light onto the weakest links of the chain, and highlights areas hitherto overlooked in previous studies. This has practical implications for both the development industry and government by pointing out current major deficiencies. The findings and recommendations presented here also support policy makers and sustainability advocates on informed decision-making, providing evidence for the necessity of shifting resources and priorities to new fronts, namely, the end-users of sustainable buildings.

Section snippets

Sustainability transition: background

As a signatory to the Paris Climate Agreement, Australia has committed to achieve net zero emissions, nationally, by 2050 (ClimateWorks, 2016). Accordingly, Australia aims to reduce emissions to under 28 percent of 2005 levels, by 2030. With Australia's strong population growth rate, this represents at least a 50 percent reduction in emissions per capita, exceeding even the targets set by the US, Japan, the EU, Canada, and South Korea (Australian Government, 2015). The Australian building

Sustainability transition: identified barriers

The literature identifies a wide range of barriers to sustainability transition in Australia. In catalyzing the process through introducing mandatory low-carbon governance instruments, NCC is relatively lenient on energy efficiency compared against its international counterparts (Iyer-Raniga et al., 2014, Wong et al., 2015). Moreover, implementation is fraught with poor enforcement (Berry and Marker, 2015b, van der Heijden, 2018). Short of strengthening the building codes and upgrading rating

Sustainability transition: the theoretical lens

A sustainable building industry, pursues sustainable technologies and techniques and sustainable production processes, has green buildings as its products, and consumes in a sustainable manner (Li et al., 2017). Achieving this objective in a certain country is in line with the definition of the ‘sustainability transition’ phenomenon, and research on this topic falls within the ‘transition research’ arena (Truffer et al., 2015). Sustainability transition offers an emerging and recent theoretical

Research methods

Primarily, qualitative methods are effective approaches in addressing issues within real-life settings (Dainty et al., 2000). The two prominent methods of collecting qualitative data comprise participant observation; typically in focus groups, or through individual interviews (Morgan, 1997). Of these, focus groups are capable of capturing the interactions and actors’ influences, based on their real-life roles (Morgan, 1997, Morgan, 2012). This is quite in line with the objectives of the present

Data analysis and findings

Analysis of interview transcripts brought to light several major findings with regard to the sustainability transition, as presented below.

Barriers to sustainability transition

Two parallel scenarios are currently vying against each other as they play out in Australia. On the one hand there is the hard reality that building stock is increasing rapidly; at unprecedneted levels. On the other hand, for Government (or at least pockets within Government) and its sustainability allies, there is the hope of reducing carbon emissions to zero. These two scenarios are wholly at logger-hards with each other. Certainly, without an effective solution, the sustainability vision

Conclusion

Commonly, sustainability transition has been viewed as a technical challenge. Rating instruments are needed to measure building performance, and new materials and techniques are needed to ensure better embodied energy and carbon emissions compliance. Moreover, the building value chain has to be examined in its entirety, from resource acquisition all the way through construction, operations and maintenance, to decommissioning, demolition and disposal. All these steps, too, have been understood

Acknowledgement

This work was funded by the Integral Design Futures (IDF) funding scheme's 2017 program: Charting Pre-Design Sustainability Indicators (School of Architecture and Built Environment, Deakin University).

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