• Energy Research
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Achievement of sustainable development in light of ongoing climate change and biodiversity pressures benefits from the deployment of innovations that foster engagement and uptake across all levels, mobilises finance flows commencement to the scale of the challenge, and enables the dissemination of transition solutions that support the low carbon economy. This research investigates the relationship between the legal architecture of market mechanisms under international law and the role of private actors, and how this contributes to sustainable development. Through an exploration of how market mechanisms under the climate change and biodiversity regimes have achieved environmentally sound outcomes, been advanced in sectoral approaches, and facilitated via bilateral and multilateral trade and investment relationships, important insights are identified regarding the composition of effective law and governance architectural approaches. Leveraging experiences derived from treaty practice viewed through an interactional account of international law, this assessment elucidates the important role played by alignment of legal regimes, robust transparency measures, and complementary schemes such as stakeholder-endorsed certifications in buttressing the established measures to ensure sustainable development outcomes and contributes to understanding the role of private actors in the operationalisation of environmental agreements. Research findings suggest it is the interaction of norms across the international legal architecture, informed by relationships within and across relevant treaty systems and the general corpus of international law, and actualised through engagement with private actors as a component of market mechanisms that provides the opportunity for congruence of practice, forging of shared understandings, and normative internalisation and ownership among communities of practice that stimulates both innovative solutions and ambitious action.

Industrial symbiosis (IS) is recognized as an effective practice to support circular economy and sustainable development because it is able to enhance the technical efficiency of production processes, provided IS relationships among companies remain active over the long period. However, although it has been established that IS relationships can be vulnerable to disruptive events that reduce the willingness of companies to cooperate in IS synergies, to date few contributions to the literature focus attention on the events which lead firms to interrupt IS synergies. This paper contributes to the existing literature firstly by highlighting the disruptive events affecting the willingness of companies to cooperate in IS synergies and their causes, and secondly by developing an analytical model to assess the impact of each disruption on physical and monetary flows created among companies by the IS relationship. Specifically, an enterprise input-output (EIO) model is proposed, aimed at mapping the physical and monetary flows resulting from IS synergies among companies. Through this model, disruptive events can be modeled and their impact on the above-mentioned flows can be assessed. A numerical case example illustrates how the model works and how company managers and IS facilitators could use it to evaluate to what degree their current IS relationships may be vulnerable to perturbations. The model could therefore facilitate the design of adequate countermeasures and contribute to the development of perturbation resilient IS relationships. Furthermore, policymakers could adopt the model when designing policy actions to support IS practice.

In many industries, an increasing number of firm owners tie managers’ incentives to sustainability investments. Positive rewards directly increase a manager's total pay when that manager makes sustainability investments, whereas negative rewards directly decrease a manager's pay when those investments are made. Strategic incentive design literature posits that such organizational choices also affect the decisions of a firm's competitors. This paper uses a game-theoretic framework to analyze the effects of sustainability incentives in a setting with two competing firms. In contrast to the existing literature, in the current paper sustainability investments have a demand-enhancing effect and can increase or decrease the unit cost of production, making the current framework more in line with industrial practice. The results show that a firm invests in sustainability only if the demand-enhancing effects outweigh the cost-increasing effects. More importantly, positively rewarding managers for sustainability investments is done in equilibrium only if the innovation capability of the firm is sufficiently high. However, in terms of profits, those positive rewards lead to a prisoner's dilemma. When innovation capability is lower, firm owners use negative rewards and raise their profits. Another finding is that rival firms that cooperate in determining their sustainability incentives increase their profits but do so using negative rewards. These results, which have not been reported in the literature, point to some critical trade-offs in terms of sustainability investments and firm profits when sustainability incentives are considered and are both managerially and academically relevant.

The construction industry in Europe is in transition. In the last decade, challenges related to inefficiencies in the sector, the shortage of skilled labour, and environmental concerns initiated a shift towards off-site manufacturing. In Hungary, the first examples of prefabricated residential buildings have just appeared after a 30-year-long break. At the same time, in post-socialist countries, the general attitude towards modern methods of construction is rather complex. While the Western examples of modular constructions are admired, local examples of prefabricated and standardised homes from the socialist era are neglected or criticised for their uniformity and inability to change. This thesis examines the social limits of standardisation in the Hungarian context, specifically focusing on how we can ensure that in the future, mass-manufactured buildings will be sustainable and retain their social respectability, technical qualities and economic value for a long time. It is found that standardisation does not necessarily limit creativity and can be socially sustainable, provided that it does not result in uniform constructions. Findings rely on an extensive review of the literature and real-life architectural examples, statistical results from two online surveys on preconceptions about mass-manufactured buildings, and space syntactical investigations of preferred home layouts. The findings of the project include showing that young Hungarian adults associate mass produced buildings with the loss of diversity, but they find these buildings environmentally friendly, fast to produce, progressive and fashionable. In addition, it is shown that it is possible to use small graph matching and density-based clustering to find the most suitable layouts for socially-conscious mass manufacturing. The practical outcomes of this project include an exemplar dwelling that showcases good design, a framework for discussing standardised buildings, and a Plug-in that can evaluate any new apartments created in Autodesk Revit based on the developed guidelines.