Agency and capacity in the planning and design phase of building renovations
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ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Agency and capacity in the planning and design phase of building renovations Katharina Reindl
Received: 24 September 2019 / Accepted: 13 July 2020 # The Author(s) 2020
Abstract The building sector is a large energy consumer and is responsible for high CO2 emissions; hence, improving the energy performance of buildings is vital. Building renovations open opportunities to improve their energy performance. Building professionals and other actors in the early phase of renovations decide what energy efficiency and saving measures will be implemented. Their role is studied here from a middle-out perspective (MOP), investigating the different actors’ agency and capacity. Agency refers here to an interest in and a willingness to implement energy efficiency and saving measures, and capacity refers to the ability to implement such measures. Higher agency and capacity are said to increase the realisation of the planned energy efficiency and saving measures. The data was gathered during three planning and design phases of renovation projects of a municipal housing company in a middle-sized Swedish town. A case study was conducted which is based on semistructured interviews with actors from the planning and design phase of the renovations, as well as participant observations and a document analysis. The levels of agency and capacity of professionals in the middle of a project’s planning and design phase are investigated thoroughly, but the here defined top and bottom levels are also in focus. The analysis shows that
K. Reindl (*) International Institute for Industrial Environmental Economics (IIIEE), Lund University, Tegnérsplatsen 4, 221 00 Lund, Sweden e-mail: [email protected]
a mismatch in agency and capacity on the different levels hindered the uptake of energy efficiency and saving measures in the planning and design of the renovation projects. Keywords Building renovation . Energy efficiency . Energy use reduction . Planning and design phase . Middle-out perspective . Agency . Capacity
Introduction Improving the energy performance of buildings is broadly acknowledged as an important task (GramHanssen and Georg 2018). The building sector is a major energy consumer, accounting for almost 40% of energy use and about 30% of the CO2 emissions in the EU as well as in Sweden. Thus, actions to reduce energy use and CO2 emissions are needed as a climate change mitigation strategy (e.g. Janda et al. 2014; GramHanssen and Georg 2018; Thuvander et al. 2012). Renovations of residential buildings provide opportunities not only to create updated and more comfortable accommodations but also to implement energy efficiency or saving measures (for simplicity referred to here as energy measures) and to achieve a more sustainable built environment (Mangold et al. 2016; Meijer et al. 2009; Palm and Reindl 2018). Many international and national agreements as well as targets exist for energy efficiency and reduction in order to mitigate climate change (Jonsson et al. 2011; Mangold et al. 2016). In Sweden, the o
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