Assessing policy measures on building energy efficiency through a multi-Actor multi-criteria analysis

Over the span of last two decades, the interest in energy performance of building stock has grown and strengthened intensely, becoming nowadays a crucial issue in academic, political and entrepreneurial debate. One of the main issues pointed out so far pertains to the existing gap between policy goals and low adoption rate of energy efficiency measures, particularly in the field of buildings refurbishment. The literature argues that the selection of such measures faces an optimization problem, wherein several objectives, constraints and alternatives must be taken into account. Therefore, evaluation approaches and decision support systems should be able to cope with a wide range of technical, economic and environmental aspects, as well as with stakeholders' concerns. This study aims to investigate the potential of Multi-Actor Multi-Criteria approach to assess the compliance between energy policy instruments and private entities' goals. The analysis is performed upon the following underlying assumption: the more conflicts the stakeholders exhibit, the less energy efficiency policies are likely to turn out being effective, and vice versa. The adopted approach is applied to the Italian context. Several representative stakeholders are asked to weight a set of criteria, which are based on their specific goals and are, furthermore, identified through an in-depth literature review. Afterward, the same stakeholders are engaged to judge different building-related energy policies implemented by government and local authorities.