The Role of Umbrella Agreements in Achieving Sustainability Goals: Energy Efficiency at the Empire State Building

Abstract

In this paper we investigate whether innovative and flexible contractual arrangements can support the process of achieving ambitious sustainability goals. We explore this question through an analysis of the role of umbrella agreements in driving energy savings in the building sector. Drawing on a case study of the iconic Empire State building, we examine the typical challenges faced by clients and contractors in devising suitable agreements that facilitate managing contractual and performance risks, as well as the sharing of responsibilities and cooperation between multiple project stakeholders. We find that the project arrangements appear to exhibit the adoption of the key characteristics commonly found in umbrella agreements which incorporate sustainability measures that maximize income through efficient delivery of outcomes. Specifically, this means that they need to enable stakeholders to manage repeated review cycles, complex perceptions and expectations, and different tacit assumptions and codes of behaviour, as well as managing and communicating in networks and obtaining agreement also from non-contractual parties. Moreover, we demonstrate that umbrella agreements can facilitate a network perspective of business relationships by emphasizing value co-creation and the embeddedness of firms within a network of interactions.

Optimization of Green Building Design Processes: Case Studies within the European Union

“…LEED and BREEAM are the most used reference standards for green building worldwide [5,30] developed on the basis of the Anglo-American scenario. Furthermore, different methodologies and tools, such as life-cycle assessment, resource planning, green building reference standards, building information modeling, and others have been implemented in order to improve building sustainability [7,8,33], and it is important to coordinate such new tasks through appropriate project management processes [13][14][15][16][17].Furthermore, case studies, interviews, standards, and data collection used for the majority of the accessed research articles related to project management and green building management are also mainly focused on the Anglo-American construction process [8,10,24,26]. In the European Union, the construction and project management processes differ from the Anglo-American approach [34,35]: There are European Union regulations that must be considered in every European country (local laws are subjected to these regulations too).…”

“…LEED and BREEAM are the most used reference standards for green building worldwide [5,30] developed on the basis of the Anglo-American scenario. Furthermore, different methodologies and tools, such as life-cycle assessment, resource planning, green building reference standards, building information modeling, and others have been implemented in order to improve building sustainability [7,8,33], and it is important to coordinate such new tasks through appropriate project management processes [13][14][15][16][17].…”

The Development of Green-Building Projects: Optimization of the Project-Management Processes Through the Lean Approach.

“…However, how demonstrated by recent studies, most readers especially between non-professional, identify sustainability with the concept of building energy efficiency (Dahlmann & Veal -2016). The idea of sustainability applied to the building sector is a much bigger concept, which embeds all possible aspects of construction practices, processes and resources implemented.…”

“…In each field new studies were developed in order to bring evidence of the importance of sustainability for a specific purpose or asset. Different methodologies, such as, life-cycle assessment, resource planning, green-building reference standards, building information modelling and others have been developed in relationship with, but not limited to, building sustainability (Dahlmann & Veal -2016). Social surveys and even anthropologic studies have been conducted within the field of sustainability in order to demonstrate the consequences and the best-practice methodologies to achieve the goals.…”