The impact of sustainability in developers' decision-making process

Abstract

In a time of increasing awareness regarding environmental and social concerns, urban area developments have been framed within ambitious goals which require the collaboration of developers and other parties. The complexity behind pursuing sustainable goals brings several challenges to the feasibility and financing of projects since private actors are mostly profit-driven and therefore, their business rationale tends to collide when taking decisions that link private profit and public values. The existing criteria to assess sustainability, mostly at an urban level, and the difficult quantification of these criteria into potential benefits for developers have been traditionally determined as seeming incompatible. Therefore, a deeper understanding of how sustainability is impacting the decision-making of area developers is required to achieve the right balance between long-term sustainability and short-term profitability.

In that sense, there is an existing gap between sustainability assessment methods and decision-making processes that needs to be filled to ease the transition towards a broader definition of value into the business rationale of developers. In that line of reasoning, market-driven rating tools for sustainability assessment represent an opportunity to analyse how their use is impacting the urban redevelopment management, providing empirical examples of how the gap with decision-making processes can be minimized. These findings, aims to evaluate the implementation of BREEAM-NL Area in The Netherlands and add knowledge on how the use of it as a methodological framework can have an impact in the decision-making process. That could potentially stimulate developers to take a more holistic approach, enhance innovation within their decision logic and embed sustainability within their corporate strategies.