This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111.5).
Green buildings are designed to reduce the consumption of water, energy, land, and building materials, as well as the production of stormwater runoff, chemical emissions, and light pollution. While these buildings are constructed under voluntary, flexible standards, an increasing number of government agencies and jurisdictions are either requiring or encouraging that buildings be certified according to a system such as the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) standards of the U.S. Green Building Council. With nearly two hundred local jurisdictions implementing such policies and over two thousand LEED-certified buildings in the U.S, it is important to understand how and why this implementation is taking place and what effect it is having on the built environment.
Dr. Julie Cidell at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign will map the landscape of green building regulation across the U.S., including where and what kinds of policies are in place and how they correspond with the locations of LEED-certified buildings. Furthermore, a combination of web-based surveys, virtual focus groups, and interviews with local experts will explore the motivations and reasons for enacting these policies at the municipal level. The theoretical framework of conventions theory, which explains how non-monetary justifications such as personal trust or concern for the environment shape conventions or understandings among disparate actors with regards to a transaction such as the construction of a building or the development of a policy, will here be applied to see how the convention of a "green building" varies from place to place. This includes how local governments use different justifications to encourage or require the public and private sectors to produce green buildings, how they negotiate with the private sector to create and implement these policies and conventions, and if and how this varies from place to place.
This research will help answer where, how and why local policies about green buildings have been implemented and what difference such policies are making to the built environment. The project will demonstrate how public policy at the local level is aiding and/or hindering the building industry in implementing green building practices, which has important implications for improving urban sustainability. Finally, the project will provide information to the U.S. Green Building Council and local governments on the efficacy of existing public policies in producing greener buildings. By participating in the project, members of local governments from across the country will become part of a network to share information on green building policymaking.
