ABSTRACT
Over the past two decades the Swedish construction industry has made a lot of effort to develop green building practices. Researchers within the field have provided a theoretical understanding of how to design green buildings and analytical environmental management tools have been developed to guide practitioners. Furthermore, information campaigns have raised general environmental awareness amongst practitioners. In spite of these efforts, mainstream building practices do not seem to have undergone any marked changes (Gluch, 2005; Femenías, 2004). Progress toward a viable and sustainable construction industry relies on its ability to foster and transfer innovative products, services and practices (Keast and Hampson, 2007). However, the absence of the large-scale innovation necessary to drive this development forward is evidence of an imperfect process. This raises a number of questions: why is it so difficult to incorporate environmental issues into mainstream business? How are environmental issues actually dealt with in the construction industry? Has development stagnated? What is causing green innovation inertia in the industry? Fundamentally, what makes it slow? This chapter aims to provide some answers to these questions by empirically examining environmental attitudes, management and performance in the Swedish construction industry. The chapter is based on a questionnaire survey carried out in the autumn of 2006 which is almost identical to one carried out in 2002 (Baumann et al., 2003). The questionnaires were sent to environmental managers or their equivalent in firms having at least 50 employees in real estate, engineering and construction, and architectural firms with at least 20 employees. This covered 542 firms and resulted in a response rate of 45.4 percent. The structure of the survey included the industry’s definition of environmental challenge, attitudes toward the challenge and the performance of, and response to, environmental measures taken by the firms. Results from the 2002 study showed that many firms at the time were working with environmental issues. However, the study showed that their
work focused mainly on a few targeted areas, e.g. toxic substances and waste management, which departed from what they perceived as the industry’s main challenge – energy savings. Firms placed much emphasis on high-level environmental management activities, e.g. environmental management systems (EMS), while the implementation of technical environmental measures met with considerable resistance. Of particular note was that significant focus was placed on pre-planning activities while feedback and self-assessment were neglected. This resulted in asymmetric communication within the firm, with the consequence that many environmental managers lacked information about their firms’ environmental performance. By repeating the survey, it has been possible to identify trends and institutionalizing processes that contribute to, as well as hinder, sustainable development and green innovation within the construction industry. This chapter points toward some possible explanations as to why the development of environmental measures sometimes does not go in the direction intended by senior managers despite receiving attention and effort.
