Assessment of green building policies – A fuzzy impact matrix approach

Green building has achieved a rapid growth as a result of growing public awareness of environmental impacts of the building stock. It is not unusual that governments use policies as a driving force for green building developments. It is well recognized that effective public policies help to overcome barriers to sustainable development. This study proposed a novel approach to evaluate the effectiveness of policies related to green buildings based on the fuzzy impact matrix. This approach was then tested in the Chinese context to assess how effective are those green building policies implemented during the “Eleventh-Five-Year” period. It is found that these green building related policies are heavily environmental sustainability oriented such as building energy efficiency, emission reduction and pollution control. The results showed that some of these policies are effective for promoting green building development in China. However more efforts are required to improve the policy effectiveness on a range of issues such as the fiscal incentive mechanisms; the transformation to integration design model; the development of energy management contracting market; the enhancement of regulatory control during the demolition stage; and increasing the service life of buildings. These findings provide a useful reference to the future policy making process.