Abstract for:Organisational actors’ motivations and building performance traps: Evidence from case studies and modelling on interactions of reputation, identity and collaboration

Given the UK’s ambition to drastically reduce carbon emissions by 2050, it is crucial to ensure high performance for newly constructed buildings. However, it is unclear whether supply side organisations can deliver such ambitious targets, what motivates them to go down a low-carbon route and what implementation challenges they face. This paper investigates important mechanisms of building design and construction that determine building performance. It focuses on how stakeholders’ motivations and actions support and challenge the implementation of high performance from design to occupation, including the underlying root causes emerging from the organisations’ identity and agendas in interaction with reputational and financial effects. Importantly, this paper investigates the interaction of these factors for both energy and indoor environmental performance outcomes. It uses a case study approach of several new-built cases for investigating how these root causes determine inter-organisational collaboration and performance outcomes. Additionally, integrating system dynamics modelling helps to provide insights on key project mechanisms and helps make the first steps towards a more generic understanding of organisational motivations and collaboration for low-carbon performance. This paper thus adds to the literature on low-carbon buildings and the performance gap and integrates these issues with a close look at supply side organisations.