What About Wood?—“Nonwood” Construction Experts' Perceptions of Environmental Regulation, Business Environment, and Future Trends in Residential Multistory Building in Finland

Abstract

Despite the sustained interest in multistory wood-frame construction (WMC) along with an expanding bioeconomy, the rate of market uptake has been modest outside North America. Changing environmental values and regulation are expected to boost WMC adoption along with an expanding bioeconomy, yet the future prospects of WMC are typically explored with an empirical focus on the actors that are already active in WMC. To address the possible bias, this paper elicits the views of nonwood actors (i.e., construction company managers and executives in the areas of procurement and project planning with no prior experience in WMC), through 10 semistructured interviews. The results indicate that the nonwood actors do not necessarily oppose WMC as such, but there remain competitive barriers for a major market growth of WMC related to, for example, lack of standardization and significant enough productivity benefits to motivate adopting a new potentially risky construction practice. Based on comparisons with previous literature, the most notable differences in opinions between wood actors and nonwood actors regarded the direction and strength of the impact of consumer preferences on WMC demand. While acknowledging that this is a crude comparison without statistical significance, one can observe similarities in the distribution of answers for the questions unrelated to WMC, but more dispersion for those addressing WMC. Yet, while the attitudes toward wood as a construction material seem to differ, both the wood and nonwood actors seem to regard the doubling of the market share of WMC in Finland by 2030 as feasible.