The socio-technical approach to addressing sustainable transition is useful for contextualizing the lock-ins of existing linear technical, institutional and behavioral dimensions. This socio-technical, systemic approach of addressing sustainable transition is useful for contextualizing complex societal problems and identifying the technical, institutional and behavioral dimensions that lock-in building industry norms.
This Sustainable Design Engineering master’s thesis aims to apply this systemic perspective to analyze the opportunities for and barriers to implementing Circular Economy (CE) in the Danish building industry. What this study highlights is that a majority of academic literature, case-study and demonstration projects are characterized by a technocratic focus and seek to make visible the sustainability potentials of CE building principles. While these analytical investigations are an important part of CE implementation, they overlook the complexity of the social and behavioral conditions of the cross-disciplinary, inter-organizational change processes needed to implement circular innovations.
While sustainable transition literature recognizes the social and behavioral dimensions as mutually reinforcing the technical and institutional, very little attention is given to understanding these highly relational conditions. Therefore, this master’s thesis integrates key insights from organizational theory and innovation studies with the aim of identify social and behavioral conditions conducive to collaborative innovation settings for higher order learning. As a conclusion to this study, the design is presented of collaboration tool for circular innovation settings. This boundary object was designed with the aim to facilitate dialogue and communication between actors, establish goals and visions for circular project ends, facilitate the boundary work essential to fostering new behaviors, and to document new knowledge generated throughout reflexive processes. This tool is useful for building industry project managers, circular consultants and resource coordinators working to implement circular innovations in transformation projects.