Title: Barriers to English housing energy efficiency: stakeholders' perspectives

Authors: Renuka Thakore; Jack Goulding; Mark Toogood

Addresses: School of Engineering, University of Central Lancashire, Harris Building, HB236, Preston, PR1 2HE, UK ' School of Engineering, University of Central Lancashire, Harris Building, HB316, Preston, PR1 2HE, UK ' School of Forensic and Applied Sciences, University of Central Lancashire, Kirkham Building, KM106, Preston, PR1 2HE, UK

Abstract: Sustainable transformation to energy efficient housing remains very challenging. While implementing effective governance remains specific to local and global contexts, more encompassing interrelated essential conditions have emerged which serve as prerequisite to varying degrees in implementing strategies for energy efficient housing in Europe. Notably, the existing English housing system has incorporated these critical drivers to leverage effective governance for energy efficient housing environments. Whilst these are important, there is a paucity of work on the understanding of 'barriers' against the backdrop of these prerequisite essential conditions from the whole system-wide stakeholders' perspectives. The purpose of this paper is to address these issues and identify a list of correlated and commonly agreed barriers from the stakeholders' perspectives. From the initial set of 40 barriers, this research identifies ten, as prioritised by online survey respondents. The paper, therefore, directs future research to investigate strategies that can overcome these key barriers.

Keywords: systems thinking; stakeholder perspectives; principal component analysis; PCA; sustainable transformation; energy efficient housing; England; energy efficiency; correlated barriers; commonly agreed barriers; online survey; sustainability.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMABS.2015.074214

International Journal of Markets and Business Systems, 2015 Vol.1 No.4, pp.329 - 365

Accepted: 18 Nov 2015
Published online: 18 Jan 2016 *

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