Institutional and policy frameworks shaping the wooden multi-storey construction markets: a comparative case study on Austria and Finland

ABSTRACT

In the urbanizing society faced with the climate change challenge, wood has major potential as a low-carbon and renewable construction material. Yet, Wooden Multi-storey Construction (WMC) remains a niche even in countries with rich forest resources. This paper compares the institutional and policy setting and assesses the WMC growth prospects in Austria and Finland, based on expert interviews, Delphi surveys, and the review of secondary materials. Clear differences were detected in the policy frameworks and institutional settings between the two countries. The Austrian fairly informal and largely private sector driven approaches to promote the growth of the WMC sector seem to have had a rather similar effect on the markets, as the formal policy measures, typically driven by the public sector in Finland. In both countries, the interviewed experts suggested additional, but partly different, policy measures and institutional changes to accelerate WMC market diffusion. In spite of the increase in WMC activity within the past ten years, the WMC market share is likely to remain rather low by 2030 in both countries, as the institutional frameworks are not expected to change abruptly. However, the future market prospects appear to be somewhat more positive in Finland compared with Austria.

KEYWORDS:

• Wood construction
• market prospects
• path-dependency
• policy instruments
• institutions

Acknowledgements

The authors sincerely thank two anonymous referees of the journal for their constructive comments to the earlier versions of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Various definitions exist for green building. The common elements include the application of life cycle perspective, considering environmental sustainability aspects, health issues and impacts on the community (Zhuo and Zao 2014).

2 CEN refers to The European Committee for Standardization.

3 Timber buildings refers to buildings in which more than 50% of the load bearing structure is made of wood or wood-based materials (based on Stingl et al. 2001).

4 These figures include the flats in multi-storey buildings with only two floors, so the definition of WMC differs from the one we provided earlier, based on e.g. Hurmekoski et al. (2018)

Additional information

Funding

Metsämiesten Säätiö Foundation (18TU119MU), Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry of Finland, and University of Helsinki, Finland. In addition, parts of the research were conducted within the project “CAREFORPARIS: Adaptation for carbon efficient forests and the entire wood value chain (including a policy decision support tool) - Evaluating pathways supporting the Paris Agreement”, supported by the Austrian Climate Research Program (KR16AC0K1315) and within the project “BenchValue - Benchmarking the sustainability performances of value chains” conducted under the ERA-NET Sumforest (Call 2016, topic 1) project supported by the European Commission (606803).