An institutional analysis of the green housing transition in China - examining developers’ capacity to deliver green housing in the Chinese housing market

Climate change has become a core issue worldwide. The building sector contributes up to 30% of global carbon emissions and has been identified as the sector with the greatest potential to reduce carbon emissions. The concept of ‘green housing’ has been introduced to deal with climate issues in housing sector. Green housing development requires complex socio-technical transitions; it does not just refer to using green materials or technologies, but also, and most importantly, the response of market actors and the institutional contexts to support transitions. However, little is known about the capability of housing developers towards green housing transition within a Chinese context. Thus, this thesis addresses this under-studied gap and investigates market responses to the Chinese government’s green housing regulations by examining the capacity of developers to adopt such regulations and deliver green housing, and identifying the key institutional constraints of the Chinese green housing transition.
The research adopts an institutional analysis as the conceptual framework and a mixture of quantitative (questionnaire survey) and qualitative (interview and work placement) methods. The empirical results in this thesis indicate that developers recognised that green housing was likely to become one of the mainstream trends in the future Chinese housing market. Indeed, a majority of them have changed, or are changing, their attitudes towards green housing transition in China. However, developers also face a series of barriers and have a dilemma in delivering green housing. Moreover, the research also reveals that the Chinese housing industry has a resistance to promoting green housing transition due to a variety of institutional constraints from both institutional environment and housing market perspectives. The dual focus on understanding to constraints formed a balance between dealing with wider institutional complexity and actual transactions. Overall, this research provides an empirical analysis of the constraints that exist to achieving a green housing transition in China. The findings of this thesis could help policymakers identify problems in the adoption of green housing regulations and provide potential solutions for the market.