The Dutch sustainable building policy: A model for developing countries?

This article explores the institutionalization of environmental policies in the Dutch building sector and the applicability of the current model to developing countries. First, it analyzes the transition of sustainable building practices in the Netherlands from the 1970s until today, exploring how these were originally embedded in a discourse on ‘de-modernization’, which attempted to improve the environmental performance of building stocks by means of self-sufficient technologies, whereas nowadays they adopt a framework of ‘ecological modernization’, with integrative approaches seeking to improve the environmental performance of building stocks through more efficient—rather than self-sufficient—technologies. The study subsequently shows how the current Dutch sustainable building framework has thereby managed to achieve a pragmatic and widely accepted rationale, which can serve to orient the ecological restructuring of building stocks in developing countries.