Capacity of Public-Private Collaborations to Incorporate Sustainable Business Models for Housing Development in Sweden: A Resilience Perspective

Abstract

Moving toward social and ecological sustainable business models requires collaborations in housing development. However, collaborations today between public and private housing developers are often the subject of criticism in terms of their sustainability efforts. One way of moving forward for these collaborations is to consider resilience as a desired property for sustainable business models. Thus, guided by a resilience perspective, semi-structured interviews have been conducted and secondary data has been collected to depict the barriers and enablers for public-private collaborations to move toward resilience and truly sustainable business models. The results reveal that barriers are development costs, knowledge, stepwise processes, and different perspectives, meanwhile enablers are knowledge transfer, trust, clear roles and agendas, win-win, instruments/incentives, and sustainability leadership. To overcome the barriers and leverage the enablers identified, resilience attributes such as knowledge transfer, social capital, space for disturbance, diverse forms of governance, and knowledge about sustainability need to be understood and applied to achieve sustainable business models in public-private collaborations.