Low carbon, water-efficient house retrofits: an emergent niche?

Abstract

Rising carbon and water footprints of housing present a significant policy challenge across the Westernized world, and this has led to a growing range of government policies and programmes designed to promote greater residential energy and water efficiency. An analysis of low carbon/energy renovations is presented based on interviews with homeowner renovators and project managers in Australia. The renovators included self-declared green renovators and other, more typical general renovators. The project managers included a range of builders, designers, coordinators and retrofitters who provided specialized low carbon/water renovation services. Using the idea of niches and multilayer perspective (MLP), the analysis reveals both the limits to government initiatives promoting low carbon/water renovations and the importance of aspirations and relations in the low carbon/water housing renovation niche. The use of deep enquiry using semi-structured interviews reveals a detailed picture of these relations that cross the supply and demand sides of housing renovation. These relations reveal interdependence and tensions that profoundly shape low carbon/water renovations. Such relations should be explicitly accounted for in the design of government programmes and regulations.