Local variants of mobile sustainable building assessment models: the marketization and constrained mutation of BREEAM ES

Abstract

The globalization of sustainable building assessment models is now a familiar topic, as are related debates about the degrees of local sensitivity of such models. The contribution of this paper is to examine empirically the way marketization affects the mutation of models as they travel, and the implications of this for local sensitivity. By marketization we mean the effects when both a market for models emerges, and the adoption of a model acts as a means for an organization or city to gain competitive advantage over rivals. Using the case of one sustainable building assessment model, the Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Model (BREEAM), and its movement from the UK to Spain and transformation into BREEAM ES, the paper reveals the important ways that marketization can constrain mutation. Using Callon's ideas about translation, we show that the model was translated in a way designed to minimize adaptations to local context in order to maximise the comparability of buildings assessed using BREEAM ES with building assessed using other variants of the BREEAM model. This suggests, we claim, that marketization is a significant reason for the outcomes of the mobility of BREEAM being the opposite of that observed in many previous studies where a model's name stays the same but its content and the practice of implementation varies.

How market standards affect building design: The case of low energy design in commercial offices

“…The desire of the client, and often the insistence by planning codes, to achieve a particular (usually Excellent) rating in BREEAM assessments also featured. This corresponds with the existing literature on the effects of legally backed regulations (Imrie, 2007;Imrie and Street, 2009) and the role of private sustainability standards (Faulconbridge, 2015;Faulconbridge and Yalciner, 2015;Schweber, 2013). Less well documented in the literature, however, is a set of market standards that interviewees suggested were of utmost significance when designing commercial offices.…”

“…Yet, Ben-Joseph has little to say about the role of private standards; his focus being on compliance with codes policed through forms of legal authority. This reflects the wider tendency to neglect the impacts on design of private regulation (Imrie and Street, 2009;Sklair, 2009) -the exception being work focussed on standards targeting sustainability (see Faulconbridge and Yalciner, 2015;Schweber, 2013). We, therefore, examine the kinds of commercial office space that market standards promote and the implications for efforts to reduce energy demand in commercial offices.…”

“…Through our analysis, we further the understanding of the relationships between the valuation of low energy design through 'instruments and markets' (Knuth, 2016), building designers practices and the potential to reduce the environmental impact of buildings. We reveal that it is not only the way sustainability standards such as BREEAM (the Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Method) and LEED (Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design) (Faulconbridge, 2015;Faulconbridge and Yalciner, 2015;Schweber, 2013) direct low energy design that should be of concern. Market standards are an institutional barrier to sustainable design (Van Bueren and Priemus, 2002) because of the way they delegitimise, de-value and side-line the proven methods of energy demand reduction.…”

“…For Jones (2009: 2520), it is the ‘political and economic actors responsible for the commission of architecture' that are of concern. Property developers, city mayors, financial institutions and asset managers all in different ways concoct and impose standards that regulate building design (Grubbauer, 2015; Guy, 1998). This implies a need to take account of a broader array of forms of private regulation and to explain how they govern the practices of building designers.…”

Exceptional architecture, learning processes, and the contradictory performativity of norms and standards

“…Standards and norms play a central role in these developments. Alongside recognized norms with legal status, such as the German DIN (German Institute for Standardization), the British BSI (British Standards Institution) or the international ISO (International Organization for Standardization), a growing number of non-binding market standards, such as BREEAM, LEED, or DGNB, work as potent mechanisms of transnational, private regulation (Schweber 2013;Faulconbridge and Yalciner 2015). These voluntary certification systems both facilitate global investment by fostering market transparency and help to involve private corporate actors in the governance of urban space.…”