Examining regime complexity in China's green housing transition: a housing developers’ perspective

The housing sector has faced significant attention in global and national policy efforts to reduce carbon emissions. Existing studies reveal green housing development to be a complex, transitionary process, with many diverse factors – financial, market, policy and technological – shaping development outcomes. However, these dynamics remain empirically and conceptually understudied within the Chinese context. With only 28% of building projects being classified as green building in 2018 [MOHURD. (2019). Statistics of green building numbers in China. Retrieved May 16, 2021, from http://cngb.org.cn/index.action?sid=402888b74f68e52e01 4f696c7643000c], little is known about how Chinese housing developers are responding to China's green building policies or what issues may be affecting them. To address this gap, this research adopts multi-level perspective theory to examine regime complexity in China's green housing transition, utilizing a quantitative survey of Chinese developers to examine their attitudes and motivations. In doing so, the findings reveal a complex set of factors within four sub-regimes that affect Chinese developer's capacity to act and elucidate the complexity of China's ongoing green housing transition. Our findings indicate that any long-term shift towards normalizing green building practices will be driven more by changes in the policy and market regimes than in the financial or technological regimes, with implications for policy makers and market actors alike.