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This document provides responses and commentary to selected issues within the MHCLG’s consultation document Building a Safer Future, Proposals for reform of the building safety regulatory system – published June 2019.

The aviation and livestock agriculture sectors are major producers of greenhouse gas emissions, and have been the subject of extensive examination to develop lower impact, more energy and resource efficient technologies. Yet little attention has been paid to the challenges faced in the adoption of these lower impact technologies in these industry sectors. In this paper we seek to understand the interactions between technological innovation and socio-behavioural contexts in the adoption of more environmentally sustainable practices. Focusing on the UK (although recognising the global context of aviation and agriculture) and using a combination of literature analysis and interview data we undertake a detailed examination of these interactions. We examine why the claims of eco-modernisation theory that argue that the drive for economic efficiency will lead also to improved energy and resource efficiency appear unfounded in our cases. We identify lock-in in both sectors, finding that the barriers to greener innovation hinge particularly on the knowledge practices that pertain in the two sectors. This ‘epistemic lock-in’, rather than simple inertia and resistance to unfamiliarity, appears crucial, and must be overcome to enable adoption of lower impact technologies.

This document provides a collective response from several University of Edinburgh academics to the questions posed as part of Dame Judith Hackitt’s Call for Evidence, Review of Building Regulations and Fire Safety. The University of Edinburgh has been an internationally leading centre for fire safety engineering research and education since the mid 1970s, and was the first institution globally to offer masters degrees in this discipline (in 1974). The fire safety engineering group at Edinburgh currently comprises 9 academic staff and more than 25 full time PhD students.

In the past fifty years, long-range commercial airliners have changed only incrementally from the paradigmatic design – a tube fuselage with swept wings and mostly-aluminium construction. Reducing the environmental impact of airliners may require radical innovations and a new paradigm, but the transition to a new paradigm is fraught with risks. This paper analyses how key risks have shaped and limited efforts to transition toward three types of radical innovations that would signifi cantly improve airliner fuel effi ciency. We use these three cases to reassess the dominant framework for analysing sociotechnical transitions – the multi-level perspective (MLP) – in light of methods and theoretical perspectives drawn from Science and Technology Studies (STS). We argue that if the MLP is to provide a robust framework for analysing sociotechnical transitions, it must be refi ned in three ways. First, it must ‘open the black box’ to account for the ways that technologically-specific risks shape the transition process. Second, rather than predefi ning particular innovations as radical or conservative, ‘mature’ or ‘immature,’ it should attend to how actors conceive of such terms; an innovation which appears ‘mature’ to one group may appear ‘immature’ to another. Third, the MLP would be strengthened by additional case studies such as ours, which examine incomplete or failed transitions.