built environment. Although planning authorities formulate objectives to promote energy efficient
buildings, these objectives often turn out to be declarations of intent, since the authorities fail to mobilise
the stakeholders to implement energy efficient technologies in local building practices.
This indicates a need to reframe policy initiatives in order to take the complexity of the challenge of
dissemination of energy efficient technologies in practice into account; acknowledging that singular
instruments are seldom sufficient to boost a wider transition in building practices, since no simple cause or
driver for change exists. The municipal level is essential in facilitating change within energy efficient
technologies, since municipals have strong interrelations with practitioners in the building sector at the
local level.
A report prepared by Maj-Britt Quitzau et.al aimed at investigating municipal efforts in promoting energy
efficient buildings and learning from their experiences: What types of challenges are municipalities facing,
when attempting to disseminate energy efficient technologies in local building projects through municipal
planning practices, and how do they cope with these challenges? The report is based on an in-depth study
of proactive planning practices performed by municipal partners in the Class 1 project and a series of
experiences, strategies and instruments are identified.
The study of municipal planning practices shows that the municipalities make serious efforts to mobilise
local stakeholders to implement energy efficient technologies through municipal planning practices, and
that they are struggling to cope with the reluctance of these stakeholders to change their building
practices. The municipalities experience that the well-established planning instruments are often neither
applicable nor effective in order to induce the necessary changes in local building practices. Instead, the
municipalities develop custom-designed planning approaches by exploiting their strong understanding of
and involvement in local building processes. Through such planning approaches with a strong local
contextual rooting, the municipalities are capable of facilitating changes in local building practices, leading
to the implementation of energy efficient technologies in local building projects.
The conclusion of the study is that the prevailing planning and regulation framework needs to be
reconsidered in order to cope with the complexity of mobilising local stakeholders to implement energy
efficient technologies in the built environment:
In order to support such a modernisation of planning practices, more proactive planning cultures need to
be established (and encouraged) among international, national and municipal planning authorities.
The first part of the report focuses on different policy instruments, while the second describes the cases in
detail. Readers wanting to get an overview of the possible planning means may focus on section 2, while
readers wanting to learn more about the implementation processes and the technological details may also
study the cases in section 4 and 5. In section 1, the reader can study the background and the frames for the
study.