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Lena Neij

Lena Neij

Professor

Lena Neij

Energy efficiency behaviour in the built environment—an assessment of current evaluation practices in the Nordic countries

Author

  • Maria Johansson
  • Niko Gentile
  • Lena Neij

Summary, in English

Behavioural change is expected to play a significant role in the transformation to a more energy efficient built environment. Despite this, current evaluation practice of interventions often overlook behavioural aspects in their ambition of advancing our knowledge on transformative change. Moreover, little attention is paid to how different research perspectives on human behaviour can complement each other in providing a broader scope and deeper understanding of behavioural change. In this study, we acknowledge this gap, and assess the current evaluation practices on behaviour. The focus is on energy efficiency in the built environment in the Nordic countries, and evaluations undertaken by researchers. The assessment shows that the Nordic evaluations apply a variety of disciplinary approaches, but have only to a limited extent addressed a psychological understanding of individual behaviour and behavioural change. We analyse and discuss the potential contribution of environmental psychology in strengthening a cross disciplinary evaluation approach. In all, the results indicate the value of also adding environmental psychology, to provide a stronger cross disciplinary understanding of behavioural change, and the need to coordinate and combine evaluations departing from different disciplinary approaches, to improve understanding of the transformational process.

Department/s

  • Environmental Psychology
  • Division of Energy and Building Design
  • The International Institute for Industrial Environmental Economics

Publishing year

2021-03-01

Language

English

Publication/Series

Energy Efficiency

Volume

14

Issue

3

Document type

Journal article

Publisher

Springer

Topic

  • Social Sciences Interdisciplinary
  • Energy Systems
  • Architectural Engineering

Status

Published

Research group

  • Environmental Psychology

ISBN/ISSN/Other

  • ISSN: 1570-646X