Major Barriers to the New Residential Building Energy-Efficiency Promotion in China: Frontlines’ Perceptions

The energy-efficiency promotion of new residential buildings in China has achieved great progress in the past three decades. However, the expected policy outcomes cannot be fully achieved due to the barriers in the policy-making and implementation process. Whereas governments play a critical role in policy formation, perceptions of stakeholders involved in the building life cycle and the industrial value chain (such as developers, design institutes and relevant material manufactures) are fundamental to the successful implementation. To collect and identify the barriers of significant influence on the industry from stakeholders’ perspectives, this paper used a nationwide institutes’ questionnaire to collect stakeholders’ voices regarding the barriers, the corresponding popularity and the severity. All the barriers were categorized according to institutions’ scorings through cluster analysis. The relationships between barriers were also analyzed according to the framework based on policy cycle and policy environment. Results indicated that the core problem is the ineffectiveness translating energy savings into benefits and profits. Accordingly, three major barriers were identified, namely the (1) unsatisfied policy design and implementation; (2) stakeholders’ lack of implementation capacity in developing and constructing high-performance new residential building projects and adopting relevant technologies; and (3) insufficient legalization of relevant market. Other identified barriers either were those not agreed by all institutions, or those could be eliminated easily after the removal of the above three barriers.