The legitimation of private net zero emission building standards in the context of global decarbonization goals

Since the Paris Agreement – where nations committed to decarbonizing their economies – private net zero standards have proliferated. Yet, their limited scope and ability to deliver tangible change threatens their legitimacy. For some scholars, this reflects societies’ limited capacity to envision pathways towards a fossil-free future. This raises questions about how private net zero standards are legitimised. Combining insights from the literature on legitimation, discourse analysis, and sociotechnical transitions, we analyse the legitimation of Net Zero Carbon Buildings by the World Green Building Council, the strongest global sustainable construction network. We find that net zero standard legitimation is a dynamic multilevel, multistakeholder process based on three strategies: vertical nesting, ambivalence, and conflict avoidance. This process perpetuates assumptions about growth, authority, and appropriate scales of action. This incremental, emission-focused approach to decarbonization is shielded from critique through claims that it contributes to broader sustainability objectives. By reproducing institutionalized narratives, global standard setters create a sense of consensus. However, this perception of consensus fails to address the complexities of implementation, contextualization, and integration of broader environmental and social concerns. These findings raise doubts in both theory and practice about the capacity of the construction sector to decarbonize through current strategies.