ABSTRACT
In the mid-nineties green building was a hot topic in the Dutch construction industry. Issues such as energy efficiency and green material use were top priority on the agenda of the government. As time passed, management of sustainable building innovation proved to be complex and diverse. This chapter describes the practice of sustainable building from the late eighties until 2008 in the Netherlands. It describes Dutch reality of the past two decades. The case illustrates that sustainability goes beyond energy and materials and needs to be coordinated, structured, controlled, and managed. Management topics such as leadership, teamwork, organization design, and cooperation between business and government are important. These management issues are thoroughly examined and are subject of the next chapters in this volume. The following sections in this chapter illustrate the managerial problems and solutions of the past twenty years in the Dutch construction industry and form an introduction to the empirical situation that is analyzed in the next chapters. It is based on twenty years of observations, interviews, and document studies in the field. General overviews of the industry are interspersed with examples from sustainable building projects.
