Stakeholders' power over the impact issues of building energy performance gap : a two-mode social network analysis

Energy-related stakeholders play a critical role in energy-saving and emission reduction. However, most previous studies focused on only a few stakeholders (e.g., occupant, designer and owner). Therefore, there is a lack of systematic analysis of energy-related stakeholders. Improving building energy efficiency requires the collaboration of all stakeholders in the building lifecycle. This study applies a two-mode social network model to investigate the stakeholders' power over the impact issues of building energy efficiency. Results show that all issues can be addressed by at least two stakeholders, thereby indicating the potential of collaboration in building energy management. Designers, manufacturers, commissioning agents and researchers are the most influential stakeholders with the highest degree centrality, betweenness centrality and eigenvector centrality. Insufficient knowledge and experience, lack of information integrity and unclear responsibility are the most influential impact issues. With the density of interaction being 1.000, nine core stakeholders (i.e. owner, designer, contractor, subcontractor, supervisor, manufacturer, commissioning agent, energy manager and researcher) and four core issues (i.e. unclear responsibility, poor collaboration and communication, insufficient knowledge and experience, and lack of information integrity) have intensive relationships. The core stakeholders account for 75% of the total stakeholders, whereas the core issues account for 25% of the total issues. Moreover, five strategies that are useful in promoting collaboration are proposed and validated. After the proposed strategies are implemented, the density of the collaboration network increased from 1.242 to 2.652. This study is not only expected to help researchers in understanding the complex interrelationships between stakeholders and issues but also practitioners in promoting effective collaboration strategies.