Promoting Sustainable Construction: European and British Networks at the Knowledge-Policy Interface

The responsibility of builders, developers, planners, architects and policy makers to promote more sustainable urban environments and buildings is consistently prioritised in nascent European, national and local planning strategies. Yet what counts as ‘sustainable construction’ varies by issue, sector and policy mandate. Proponents of sustainable construction might promote technological shifts in terms of materials, energy use and waste reduction, or they might encourage cultural and behavioural adaptations to how society views, uses and plans its built environment. This paper examines this problematic bifurcation of sustainable construction into two exclusive agendas: the construction technology agenda and the urban sustainability planning agenda; each constituted by distinct policy and sector-based networks. It is argued that the orientation to detail in the construction technology agenda operates at odds with the holistic process orientation of the broader urban sustainability agenda, thus complicating the effective translation or cogeneration of sustainable construction knowledge between the two networks. The lack of integration between these two sets of networks should be cause for concern, yet appears to be largely overlooked in mainstream policy processes.