Categorizing barriers to energy efficiency in buildings

Introducing new technologies in buildings in Sweden have historically been connected with great portions of scepticism, hence influencing the speed of acceptance of new technologies. The speed is slow even though technologies are tested, evaluated, proven to make an impact, and economic efficient. In order to understand acceptance of energy efficient technologies in multifamily buildings and to identify the origin of barriers to energy efficiency this paper investigates barriers as consequences of the current system structure in the Swedish building sector. The study views the Swedish building sector as a sociotechnical system built from technical artefacts, institutions, and actors, thus often deeply embedded in our societies. The Swedish building sector is well structured, resulting in that innovation and development occurring outside of the existing sociotechnical regime might not be recognized as feasible investments. In order to identify the structures enabling barriers to energy efficiency adoption this paper aims at developing a framework for categorizing barriers depending on their structural origin. The categorization framework is inspired by theories of sustainable innovation journeys and of soft systems and distinguishes between three decision-levels for barriers to energy efficiency: Project level, Sector level and Contextual level. By implementing the proposed categorization framework it becomes obvious that problem areas in the building sector are not connected to any specific structural level. However, results in this study reveal that most barriers originate in the Contextual level, which implies that energy and sustainability are not yet key aspects when forming and transforming contextual preconditions on how to design and build multifamily buildings in Sweden. (C) 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.