| Popis: |
Office buildings are products in a market, labelled to signal their quality and/or distinctiveness. Increasingly, some of these labels indicate the ‘greenness’ of buildings: their sustainability, and/or anticipated thermal or energy performance. These labels, both state/mandatory and industry/voluntary, not only help ‘customers/consumers’—those who invest in, develop, trade and rent them—to buy a superior product. They should also operate as a form of governance, to shift the market towards greener buildings. Our research highlighted how such labels operate in the speculative development office market in the UK. Their governance power is subsumed under the market demands for quality such that ‘green’ labels signal high-rental value and have decoupled from environmental performance. This demonstrates that in this context, non-economic normative, political and environmental values struggle to thrive, be promoted in and affect the market through labelling. |
