Green Leases and Green Leasing: Part 1 - What is in a name?

Much of the text in this post is taken from my PhD thesis which I defended in May 2019 and is titled: 'Green Leasing: A study of the Barriers and Drivers for Green Leased Offices in Norway', and can be read on NTNU Open Access at this link: https://lnkd.in/d9ufDJf

This post is Part 1 of 3 (or possible 4) posts looking into Green Leases and Green Leasing, how they are different and also how by using them together Facilities Managers, building owners, and other stakeholder can improve the sustainability of the built environment.

In this introductory post, we will be looking at terminology, why we need it and why 'Green Leases' and 'Green Leasing' are not the same things.

What is in a name?

In 2014 when I began to look into Green Leases, I was using the terms 'Green Leasing' and 'Green Leases' interchangably, and had no reason what so ever to consider there to be a difference between either. However, when you dedicate your time on such a topic for half a decade, you begin to see not only that there is a difference between the two, but also that establishing new terminology is crucial in allowing a field to better grow and express itself. The exploration of both terms (along my development of 'Green Leasing' as a Facilities Management term) became a focul point of my Doctoral work, and it is a pleasure to present these findings there.

With regards to academic usage, in particular, McKinley (2007) notes that a lack of consistent usage of terms and measurements in science risks developing barriers that could stifle the cross-study accumulation of knowledge (McKinley, 2007, p.123). This was an opinion reinforced by Pfeffer (1993), who stated that “fields can scarcely expect to produce knowledge' without a ‘minimal level of consensus” about what they are talking about (Pfeffer, 1993, p.611). According to Hill et al, these problems exist for numerous reasons, ranging from enhancing the academics position, orientating a paper to better fit it’s

intended publication, attempts to appear ‘novel’ and trying to differentiate their work from their previous scholarly endeavours (Hill et al., 2012, p. 191).

Green Leasing vs Green Leases

Whilst Green Leasing and Green Leases are separate entities and not necessarily co-dependent, the nature of their implementation necessitates a degree of study in conjunction with both concepts. This co-dependency is described in Axon et al., (2012), who state that tackling sustainability (in this case in form of energy reduction) in commercial tenanted buildings is complex and comes from an interrelationship between the variety of building

stock, the number and type of stakeholders (e.g. landlords, tenants, FM’s, investors and users), organisational and social practices within these stakeholders, and lease structures and lease language (Axon et al., 2012, p. 462). The idea of using a mechanism (which in this case is Green Leasing) to bring together a network of stakeholders can be considered not just important for pooling skills and resources to further sustainable development in the built environment, but also better orientate sustainably positive behaviour in an organisation (Lutzenhiser et al., 2002, p. 41).

Whilst a ‘Green Lease’ is a physical formal and legal lease document, my research placed its primary (although not exclusive) focus on ‘Green leasing’. Green Leasing refers to the process, decisions, and development that leads to and/or involves itself with the operational stages of the Green Lease (or another lease) documents implementation (Collins, 2018). This ‘leasing’ as a process also means that it straddles all three levels of Organisational Management (OM) (Atkin & Brooks, 2015, p.46). To a greater or lesser extent, my research deals with all three of the levels of these levels, which consist of the ‘Strategic’, ‘Tactical’ and ‘Operational’. At the ‘Strategic level’ my research looked at the decision making processes, barriers and drivers in the development of sustainable commercial rental offices, both from the perspective of landlord and tenant. At the ‘Tactical Level’ I looked at how these buildings put their sustainable policies into practice, and how tenants are involved in the development of the offices they rent. Finally, at the ‘Operational Level’, my research and publication looked at how these other two levels influence the operational phase of these Green Leased buildings, and how the likes of Facilities Management (FM) are affected by a sustainable approach to the running of these buildings.

When referring to the term ‘Green Leased’, this is a term that combines both the terms of ‘Green Leasing’ and ‘Green Leases’. In effect, this means that a ‘Green Lease’ is a product, whilst ‘Green Leasing’ creates a product.

The contextual placing of Green Leases and Green Leasing is also crucial, which is why it is also important not just to look at these terms as concepts, but also as elements assimilated into a buildings lifecycle stages, particularly as sustainability and building performance are considered to be increasingly interlinked (Bartlett et al., 2000, p.316). Life cycle thinking in the context of Green Leases and Green Leasing also can be reflected in a statistic concerning emissions, with worldwide emissions from a lifecycle perspective that includes construction operation and demolition, amounting to 33% of these emissions globally (Forsythe et al., 2015, p.262). The below Figure endeavours to describe Green Leases and Green Leasing with the overall context of building lifecycles and organisational management.

Green Lease and Green Leasing Contextual Framework (Collins, 2019, p. 14)

In the above figure, we see that Green Leases as documentation whilst they are enablers to accessing a property and services in the Operational Stage, are Strategic as a policy instrument, but Tactical as an actual document. Green Leasing, however, is not a tangible item, but instead, a process that intermingles with the Operational level considerations associated with both the user based and FM based elements of building operations.

Green Lease and Green Leasing initiatives are unlikely to be found in early design stages, although decisions in that part of the lifecycle of a building are likely to result in one or both of these things later in a building lifecycle. The nature of the embeddedness and placements of Green Leases will be dealt with individually in the next few posts. Most of the research in this the diagram features in the ‘Detailing Phase’ and ‘Operational Phase’ in the context of this diagram, whilst ultimately straddling all of the levels of Organisational Management with varying degrees of weight. What needs to be stated however is that the Figure represents a linear model of this process, which is not always how this plays out in practice with processes often featuring a more diverse set of elements and order of process.

What next?

With this post we have looked at why the creation of terminology is important, and what this approach means for the study of Green Leases and Green Leasing. In Part 2 in a couple of weeks, we will look at Green Leases themselves in isolation, what they are and in many respects, what they are not.

References

Axon, C. J., Bright, S. J., Dixon, T. J., Janda, K. B., & Kolokotroni, M. (2012). Building communities: reducing energy use in tenanted commercial property. Building Research & Information, 40(4), 461-472. doi:10.1080/09613218.2012.680701

Bartlett, E., & Howard, N. (2000). Informing the decision makers on the cost and value of green building. Building Research & Information, 28(5-6), 315-324. doi:10.1080/096132100418474

Collins, D. (2018). Green Leases and Green Leasing: A Terminological Overview of Academia and Practice. Paper presented at the European Facilities Management Conference (EFMC) 2018, Sofia, Bulgaria.

Collins, D. (2019). Green Leasing: A Study of the Barriers and Drivers for Green Leased Offices in Norway. (Philosophiae Doctor Article Based), Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Trondheim, Norway. Retrieved from https://ntnuopen.ntnu.no/ntnu-xmlui/bitstream/handle/11250/2606407/Dave%20Collins_fulltext.pdf?sequence=5&isAllowed=y ( 2019:150)

Forsythe, P., & Wilkinson, S. J. (2015). Measuring office fit-out changes to determine recurring embodied energy in building life cycle assessment. Facilities, 33(3/4), 262-274. doi:10.1108/f-08-2013-0065

Hill, A. D., Kern, D. A., & White, M. A. (2012). Building understanding in strategy research: The importance of employing consistent terminology and convergent measures. Strategic Organization, 10(2), 187-200. doi:10.1177/1476127012445239

Lutzenhiser, L., Janda, K., Kunkle, R., & Payne, C. (2002). Understanding the response of commercial and institutional organizations to the California energy crisis. A report to the California Energy Commission-Sylvia Bender, Project Manager.

McKinley, W. (2007). Managing Knowledge in Organization Studies Through Instrumentation. Organization, 14(1), 123-146. doi:10.1177/1350508407071863

Pfeffer, J. (1993). Barriers to the Advance of Organizational Science: Paradigm Development as a Dependent Variable. The Academy of Management Review, 18(4), 599-620.