Management Engineering, Mai-britt Quitzau et.al
Improvement of the energy performance of buildings represents an important focus area in Europe, since
there is a need to reduce the heat loss from building envelopes and implementing a greater share of
renewable energy. One of the major policy responses from the European Commission has been to set up
the Energy Performance of Building Directive in European legislation. Although this type of regulation
provides an important push towards improved building standards in Europe, it has certain limitations in
terms of preparing the ground for a more fundamental break with the inertia that still exists in the building
sector with regards to improvement in the energy performance of buildings.
Traditional energy policy responses to lack of diffusion of technologies often rely on a too simplistic view of
technology transfer, where emphasis is put on removing single `barriers' to technology take-up (Shove
1998). It is therefore argued that policy makers often fail to recognise that technical transfer represents a
contextual, localised and temporally specific process, which is often governed by nonlinear processes,
rather than rational and goaloriented processes (Geels 2005). This points towards a need to reframe policy
initiatives in order to take the complexity 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 (Elle et al. 2002; Geels 2005).
The aim of this paper is to explore the conditions that urban governments have for proactively promoting
low energy buildings at the local scale. These conditions are explored by looking into the use of municipal
planning systems to enforce higher energy efficiency standards as a potential form of experimentation in
transition processes. In doing that, urban governments are pointed out as proactive agents of change at the
local level; demonstrating potential transformative power with regards to climate change processes.
Through a review of five case studies of municipal initiatives to promote more energy efficient buildings
from different countries in Europe, the paper provides insight into how proactive urban governments
engage with and navigate within different prevailing planning and regulation frameworks to promote low
energy buildings.
The study in this paper is based on the work carried out in the EU Concerto Class 1 project, where one aim
has been to look into how energy efficient buildings have been deliberately promoted among the five
participating municipalities in the project (in Denmark, Italy, Estonia, Romania and France). The study is
based on a case-oriented review on proactive municipal attempts to promote energy efficient buildings
through their planning practices. The caseoriented approach does not aim at providing a stateoftheart
analysis of the planning and regulation systems in Europe, but at providing a more contextual
understanding of the preconditions that municipalities experience, when trying to promote energy efficient
settlements. The cases were strategically selected so that these represent flagships for the involved
municipalities in terms of promoting energy efficient buildings.
The study shows that although important instruments exist in the planning and regulation frameworks in
Europe these are not always applicable for proactive municipalities that wish to more radically promote
energy efficiency in local building projects. In most of the studied cases, the building regulation represents
an important instrument with a high degree of legislative power. However, in several of the case studies,
the building regulation is defined at the national level, which leaves the municipalities without local
influence. Another important instrument is the detailed plan, which provide a great degree of freedom for
the municipalities in most of the case studies. However, in several of the cases, the detailed plan does not
have any legal impact, which play down its transformative powers. In most of the cases, the municipalities