Governing distributed expertise in knowledge commons:From carbon lock-in to sustainable building

This paper deals with the issue of expertise and professional expert knowledge in the context of grand challenges. The grand challenge observed deals with the greening the Danish construction industry by introducing new and sustainable building materials in an industry characterized by a lock-in to carbon-intensive building materials. Our focus is on the dual role of experts and professionals in maintaining and challenging status quo. While extant research has stressed the role of coordinated action of experts and organizations in addressing complex societal challenges, our study illustrates how lock-in to established practices, and change hereof, is a result of distributed collective action of experts and professionals. The distributed nature of expertise constitutes sustainable building as a collective action problem necessitating new forms of governance to realize.