Local variants of mobile sustainable building assessment models: the marketization and constrained mutation of BREEAM ES

Abstract

AbstractThe globalization of sustainable building assessment models is now a familiar topic, as are related debates about the degrees of local sensitivity of such models. The contribution of this article is to examine empirically the way marketization affects the mutation of models as they travel, and the implications of this for local sensitivity. By marketization, we mean the effects when both a market for models emerges, and the adoption of a model acts as a means for an organization or city to gain competitive advantage over rivals. Using the case of one sustainable building assessment model, the Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Model (BREEAM), and its movement from the UK to Spain and transformation into BREEAM ES, the article reveals the important ways that marketization can constrain mutation. Using Callon's ideas about translation, we show that the model was translated in a way designed to minimize adaptations to local context in order to maximize the comparability of buildings assessed using BREEAM ES with buildings assessed using other variants of the BREEAM model. This suggests, we claim, that marketization is a significant reason for the outcomes of the mobility of BREEAM being the opposite of that observed in many previous studies where a model's name stays the same but its content and the practice of implementation varies.