A multi actor multi criteria approach to evaluate the effectiveness of European policies on buildings energy retrofit. The Italian context

In recent years the traditional models and tools used by the public sector to attract private capital into urban regeneration are in crisis, partly due to the economic situation. At the same time, new paradigms able to capture the interest of private subjects in regeneration are emerging. One of these, and perhaps the most interesting for its potential and the growing interest from the European Union, is the energy retrofit of existing buildings. According to some studies carried out at European and international level, the savings on energy bill and the increase of buildings market value not always seem to be able to justify a redevelopment intervention. A purely financial approach to existing buildings energy retrofit is thus not sufficient to define the convenience of such interventions, since stakeholders, social actors and their interests are multiple and often conflicting. Furthermore policies developed by the European Union are complex and have to deal with different issues such as environmental protection, fossil fuel dependence reduction and the incentive of the building sector. Therefore, present research aims to analyse the compliance between European energy policies and stakeholders' goals, using a multi-actor-multi-criteria approach in order to assess all the aspects that investors and public bodies take in account in an energy leads redevelopment project. The underlying assumption can be summarized as follow: in the framework of sustainability and social policies, the lower the conflict among actors, the greater the effectiveness of the measures. European policy measures are classified depending on their nature of economic incentives or command and control policies. Focusing on the Italian context, representatives of main stakeholders involved in energy retrofit projects are identified, asked to weight a common set of criteria (based on their specific objective) and then to evaluate the compliance between policy measures and their goals. The weighting of criteria and judgement among policy measures are based on the fuzzy set theory to model the stakeholders’ subjectivity in the assessment. A cluster analysis allows identifying policy measures, and subsets of them, creating fewer conflicts among stakeholders. Results are then compared with the single judgements expressed by each stakeholder so as to analyse the relationship between goals optimization and conflict reduction, and to define a policies ranking based on their effectiveness.