Call for Papers: Building governance and climate change: regulation and related polices

CALL FOR PAPERS

Special issue: Building governance and climate change: regulation and related polices

When considering the limited development of building codes against the background of the Brundtland Report (1987), the lack in progress is notable.  This raises the question of whether the existing focus of building regulations and control policies should expand from issues of inhabitant health and safety to include a wider remit of environmental health and safety. This will challenge traditional regulatory roles and responsibilities. It also raises wider questions of what alternatives exist or can be created for the governance of these issues.

This special issue will explore alternatives for the role, processes (and politics), the system and its institutional structures, the formulation, the content and the organization of governance (normally thought of as 'building regulations and building control policies' and the influence of standards) in the following areas:

• Alternative governance approaches (e.g. building performance and reducing energy performance gaps)

• The application of life cycle thinking to governance

• The potential for the inclusion of resilience strategies (for long-term uncertainties) into governance

• The balance between command and control regulations versus incentive schemes

• New roles for control and supervision: widening the focus from the design stage to monitoring the construction process, testing the quality of the final building and monitoring/adjusting its occupied performance

• The role of regulations and related polices for existing buildings and adaptive re-use of buildings

• The contradictions between regulation as a barrier (e.g. for the construction of affordable housing) and as

  protection (e.g. health & safety, climate change, etc)

• Unintended consequences (e.g. higher requirements leading to the demolition of existing buildings, etc)

• Institutional frameworks for regulatory systems or other forms of governance

• The risks and effects of path dependence in regulations

Important dates:

Call for Abstracts issued 23 February 2015

Deadline for abstract submission Tuesday 07 April 2015

Abstracts selected & authors notified  17 April 2015

Full paper due 07 September 2015

Revised paper due 25 January 2016

Publication  mid-2016

Guest editors: 

Professor Edwin Chan, Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Dr Jacques Laubscher, Tschwane University of Technology