Sustainability assessment - what is it good for?

Building sustainability assessment schemes enjoy significant uptake worldwide. Viewing such schemes as a passive assessment is however to ignore the business and political context in which they operate. Successful schemes operate in a pseudo commercial manner, and offer potential for market transformation and marketing accolade, as well as simple assessment. Remarkably, little research appears to have been conducted to establish which of these most motivates the users of the schemes, or whether the assessments ultimately meet their needs. Closing this knowledge gap is, it is argued, essential both in determining whether a genuine business case exists for assessment, and also whether assessment leads to more sustainable buildings. A research project is described which will address this issue, based upon case study projects. Explorative interviews will reveal motivations for advocating assessment. This output will then inform a second quantitative phase, measuring how well the various project team members’ expectations were met. The case studies will be used to generate theory concerning the effectiveness of sustainability assessment. If proven on a larger scale, this theory may be developed to inform the future development of both established schemes, and of the many new schemes currently arising to serve emerging world economies.