Development and upscaling of integral sustainable energy innovations in housing: the role of practice and underlying drivers, combining theoretical perspectives for a new research agenda

The goal of this paper is to elaborate a theoretical framework and research design for further research related to the question ‘What practices and underlying drivers explain adoption of integral sustainable energy innovations in the Dutch housing sector?’. Although there are many efforts to speed up development and diffusion of sustainable innovations in the Dutch built environment, innovative capacity of the construction sector in particular has been rather low. There have been a number of experiments showing integral sustainable innovation in practice, but application on a large scale has been disappointing. Some traditional applications seem to be ‘locked in’, whereas other innovative ones are ’ locked out’, for example in the field of energy. Furthermore, it looks like there is a ‘deadlock’ on innovations in the sector as both the demand and supply side of the market are not able or willing to make sufficient investments. Additionally, government innovation support programs do not provide the ‘right’ incentives to trigger momentum (Faber and Hoppe, 2013). In this paper we survey multiple interdisciplinary theoretical perspectives - such as transition management (Loorbach, 2007), the ‘multilevel perspective’ (Geels, 2002), and strategic niche management (Kemp et al., 1998) - that can be of use when studying development and diffusion of sustainable innovations in the built environment. In this paper we conceptualise the concepts of sustainable innovation and what we call ‘sustainable innovation practice’. The paper ends with a theoretical framework which allows for analysis of the development and diffusion of integral sustainable energy innovations in housing by assessing demonstration projects.