Prerequisites for Successful Strategic Partnerships for Sustainable Building Renovation

The purpose of this paper is to identify the prerequisites for establishing successful strategic partnerships in relation to renovating buildings sustainably. Establishing strategic partnerships is in the paper seen as a potential way to make building renovation more sustainable in Denmark particularly in terms of reducing energy consumption and use of resources and increase productivity. However, until now we have only had a limited number of such partnerships implemented and the few examples that do exist, mostly concern the construction of new buildings. The paper is based on an investigation and analysis of strategic partnerships models as well as typical processes used in building renovation. Experiences from development of new strategic partnerships have particularly been found in the UK and Sweden. Based on two workshops with practitioners representing the whole value chain in the construction industry and analyses of two exemplary cases the paper suggests prerequisites for establishing successful strategic partnerships for sustainable building renovation. The results show that strategic partnerships are collaborations set up between two or more organizations that remain independent with the purpose of obtaining a goal of mutual and high priority based on a binding commitment and a long term perspective by a consecutive number of projects. An essential prerequisite for most of the identified challenges in building renovation processes is stable project partners. Framework agreements is a way to legally establish collaboration with more stable project partners, but it is also in itself an important prerequisite to target challenges related to tender, competition and an extreme focus on lowest price.