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India's present development trajectory is at a crucial juncture with a requirement to meet the demands of a population of over 1.2 billion while ensuring environmental sustainability. The resulting economic growth over the past two decades has over-exploited finite natural resources and led to tremendous environmental degradation. Therefore, decoupling economic growth from resource consumption is crucial in the transformation towards a green economy. Building construction is one of the most resource-intensive sectors, as well as creating a high impact on the environment. This study analyzes existing mechanisms in India's building construction sector that attempt to decouple economic growth from resource use and environmental impacts. The key contributors for decoupling are analyzed. Recommendations for regulations, market incentives, transparency, data monitoring and capacity-building are provided for an array of policy initiatives targeted at political and financial decision-makers at the national, state and local levels for different buildings.
Urban energy systems have been commonly considered to be socio-technical systems within the boundaries of an urban area. However, recent literature challenges this notion in that it urges researchers to look at the wider interactions and influences of urban energy systems wherein the socio-technical sphere is expanded to political, environmental and economic realms as well. In addition to the inter-sectoral linkages, the diverse agents and multilevel governance trends of energy sustainability in the dynamic environment of cities make the urban energy landscape a complex one. There is a strong case then for establishing a new conceptualisation of urban energy systems that builds upon these contemporary understandings of such systems. We argue that the complex systems approach can be suitable for this. In this paper, we propose a pilot framework for understanding urban energy systems using complex systems theory as an integrating plane. We review the multiple streams of urban energy literature to identify the contemporary discussions and construct this framework that can serve as a common ontological understanding for the different scholarships studying urban energy systems. We conclude the paper by highlighting the ways in which the framework can serve some of the relevant communities.