ABSTRACT

The world has been grappling with energy efficiency for decades. Much attention has been focused on how government can encourage energy efficiency, but there has been essentially none on industry perspectives of which government interventions are necessary to encourage these actions to become the norm. We address this gap through a study of industry views as to which government interventions prompt corporate actors to adopt energy efficiency measures across three industries (building and construction, energy/utilities, and hospitality) in Canada and the United Kingdom. Our findings demonstrate that industry responses mirror recent literature on the need for a mixture of policy tools. Where our findings depart from this literature is that we find a strong endorsement of the use of information provided by government and antipathy towards the use of economic instruments to engender new norms of behaviour. This finding is particularly significant given that much of the literature focuses on the benefits of economic instruments in advancing sustainability goals. We also find the express norms found in command and control instruments are, in the views of industry actors, necessary to make a shift from energy efficiency actions being carried out only by leaders within the industry to these actions becoming standard.

摘要

数十年来，世界一直在努力提高能源效率。人们已经将很多注意力集中在政府如何鼓励能源效率上，但是从本质上讲，对于政府鼓励这些行为成为规范所必需的干预措施，业界几乎没有关注。我们通过对行业观点的研究来解决这一差距，即政府干预促使公司参与者在加拿大和英国的三个行业（建筑和建筑，能源/公用事业和酒店业）采取节能措施。我们的发现表明，行业的反应反映了有关混合使用政策工具的最新文献。我们的发现与这些文献不同的地方在于，我们强烈支持使用政府提供的信息，并对使用经济手段产生新的行为规范表示同情。鉴于许多文献都集中于经济手段在推进可持续发展目标方面的好处，因此这一发现特别重要。我们还发现，从行业参与者的角度来看，指挥和控制工具中的明确规范对于从仅由行业领导者执行的节能行动向这些行动转变为标准的行动是必要的。