the Danish case had to apply easements as a way for the municipality to define their own energy efficiency
requirements with a legal impact. In both Estonia and Italy, municipalities already have this ability, because
they have the authority to define building regulation in local building projects.
The conclusion is that the reviewed case studies demonstrate that municipalities have a strong position to
operationalise strategies of energy efficient buildings, and a willing to do so. However, the municipalities
lack support from prevailing planning and regulation frameworks due to lack of authority and legislative
impact of the available instruments. In spite of this lack of support from the planning and regulation
framework, municipalities show that they are capable of implementing energy efficient technologies in
local building projects through alternative means. This illustrates that the current planning and regulation
framework fails to encompass the variety of strategies for promoting energy efficiency that municipalities
have at their disposal. Municipalities fill out a number of different roles, where they are able to promote
energy efficient technologies in different ways, e.g. being planning authority, property owner, developer or
approving authority. Each of these local processes provides different conditions and possibilities to
promote energy efficiency in the built environment, and in each case, different instruments may be
combined in order to fulfil the targets.
For more information, see the paper:
Concerto project"