Stakeholder games in the evolution and development of green buildings in China: Government-led perspective

Abstract

The construction industry is a major consumer of energy and source of environmental pollution throughout the world, and thus there is an urgent need to promote green building practices to facilitate sustainable development. In the context of slow green building development in China, the relationships among stakeholders are varied and not uniform, thereby hindering green building development, so change needs to be driven by the government due to the public welfare nature of green building. In this study, three stages of green building development and evolution were determined, and a game model was established for the three stages based on the correlations between construction units in order to explore a mechanism for selecting construction units in the context of government control. An evolutionary game model was established between the construction units and the buyer by treating government subsidies as the controlling factor to analyze the evolutionary equilibrium strategy for the construction units and buyer in multiple situations. Finally, a game model based on government supervision and construction units was established to explore the factors that influence the green building construction process. The results showed that providing government subsidies to construction units can promote the development of green buildings. In addition, providing subsidies to homebuyers might not yet play a positive role in the selection of green buildings because buyers are passive regarding green buildings, so the government needs to implement measures to stimulate the demand for green buildings among buyers. The green building construction process cannot be separated from government supervision, particularly the government punishments imposed on construction units for not complying with green standards, and the government’s own losses and supervision costs when supervision is not strict. Relevant measures and suggestions are proposed.