Governance for sustainable development in the world of buildings and real estate

In the course of research conducted in collaboration with Prof. Gunther Maier at WU Wien two articles have recently been published by Sabine Sedlacek (Department of Public Governance and Sustainable Development) about the global green building development in general and about the World Green Building Council (WGBC) and its regional councils (GBCs) all over the world more specifically:

Sedlacek, S., Maier, G., 2012. Can green building councils serve as third party governance institutions? An economic and institutional analysis. Energy Policy 49, pp. 479-487.

Sedlacek, S. 2014. Nongovernmental organizations as governance actors for sustainable development – the case of green building councils. Environmental Policy and Governance 24, pp. 247-261.

The green or blue building movement is a growing phenomenon and has become big business recently. Dr. Sedlacek clarifies the difference, ‘’it started with energy efficiency in buildings, so this would be the classical green building. Now there are blue buildings, which are sustainable buildings incorporating the whole concept of the three dimensions of sustainability: the social, economic and ecological dimensions should be combined.’’

The movement is shaped by interaction and cooperation of different involved stakeholders and forms therefore a specific type of governance, which is known as non-state market driven governance. ‘’This is a very specific form of participatory governance where the stimulus is coming from the market, from private organizations namely business and nonprofit organizations. It's basically that nongovernmental organizations are organizing coordinating bigger networks of businesses under a particular umbrella, in my case its green buildings, but it exists in other industries as well,’’ says Dr. Sedlacek.

A major obstacle faced by GBCs is the varying standards and certification procedures used in different countries. Without a transparent certification scheme allowing for geographical differences, developers may present ‘green buildings’ to investors at a higher cost than a conventional building, but how can investors be sure it will be a green building? This leads to the ‘’prisoners’ dilemma’’ where lack of transparency leads to difficulty in proving the legitimacy of a developer’s claims.

‘’It's not visible, it's not transparent on the market - what if the developer tells you this is a green building, but you cannot prove it. Certification is of course a good means you have on hand to prove it, but most of these standards are all based on different criteria, which make it very hard to compare the different standards. There are such NGOs as GBCs which could take over a kind of governance role where they fulfill a reliable role on making this green of blue building development more transparent and provide more information. The certification process plays a role, so who is a reliable third party being able to provide these certifications to make it transparent, visible, and to make sure that people are interested in investing in such buildings? If there is no trust or security on the market you would not invest your money.’’

This need for improved policies governing green building spurred Dr. Sedlacek and Dr. Maier on in their research, which deals on the one hand with the governance role of green building councils (GBCs) and on the other hand with the actors’ constellations within these specific governance processes. Therefore they started to investigate the global movement on the basis of an online questionnaire based survey sent to approximately 45 GBCs around the world in English, with around 47.5% of the councils responding. 

'’I am also interested in regional differences, the hypothesis that there is a different development and dynamics in Europe and say Asia, the sample wasn't big enough to work out these regional differences - but it was a perfect starting point,’’ says Dr. Sedlacek, She then attended two green building events in Budapest and Prague and interviewed CEOS from GBCs, which backed up their sample quite well and also collected a lot of supplementary material, and they contacted councils all over the world to provide more information.

This groundbreaking research was started in 2011 and during that time it was still a young and unstructured development. ‘’I had a window of opportunity as it was not yet over-researched. If you address businesses with a questionnaire nowadays you do not receive so many answers. It was really a pioneer role!’’ In addition she conducted an in-depth case study of the Austrian GBC ÖGNI (Österreichische Gesellschaft für nachhaltige Immobilienwirtschaft) in collaboration with Hannes Hippacher (MU graduate, WKW) which was presented at the ÖGNI General Assembly as part of the Sustainable Building Conference (SB13) in Graz in September 2013.

Hannes Hippacher and Sadine Sedlacek at SB13

The latest article “Nongovernmental organizations as governance actors for sustainable development – the case of green building councils” examines the role of non-governmental organizations in environmental governance systems with a particularemphasis on non-state market-driven governance in the green building industry. The paper explores the role of the Regional Green Building Councils (RGBC) listed in the WGBCs directory within this newly deployed governance system. The results confirm the proposition that RGBCs grow in their governance and third-party role as they progress through the development stages proposed by the WGBC.

And what are the next steps for GBCs? ‘’It becomes more and more important to link them to policy and to governmental organizations. This is what happened already at the European scale so that the European GBC network is closely collaborating with the EU Commission and is linked to climate change and energy efficiency policy. That should be the next step for the regional councils as well, countries should link their activities to governmental activities and to link it policy if they want a bottom up initiative to reach high standards in climate change policy goals. If they join together with governments and sub governmental organizations it will become more efficient,’’ says Dr. Sedlacek.

Links to the Journals: Energy Policy: www.journals.elsevier.com/energy-policy/

Environmental Policy and Governance: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1002/%28ISSN%291756-9338;jsessionid=CBB9E43BC604098C801415ED0D10E0C9.f04t03