Unlocking the Heat Transition: Regulatory Barriers and Policy Enablers

Decarbonising the building sector is critical to achieving climate neutrality in Europe, yet progress remains constrained by low renovation rates, continued reliance on fossil-based heating, fragmented governance, and persistent social and financial barriers. This paper examines which policy instruments and governance approaches are considered effective for building decarbonisation in the European Union and how these are perceived by stakeholders in Austria. It combines a structured literature review of recent research on EU and Austrian building decarbonisation with qualitative evidence from semi-structured interviews and a focus group involving stakeholders from public administration, housing, construction, civil society, and academia. The findings show that building decarbonisation depends on coherent policy mixes rather than isolated interventions. Effective approaches require the alignment of regulatory standards, financial support, advisory structures, infrastructure planning, and social protection mechanisms in order to accelerate deep renovation and heating system transformation. Across the literature and stakeholder evidence, the main barriers include high upfront costs, split incentives in rental housing, legal constraints in tenancy and condominium law, administrative fragmentation, and regulatory instability. In Austria, these barriers are compounded by a federal governance structure that generates variation across provinces and weakens policy coherence. The paper argues that building decarbonisation in Austria is primarily a governance and implementation challenge. Accelerating the transition therefore requires a stronger focus on the existing building stock, a reform of housing-related legal frameworks, improved coordination across governance levels, more predictable policy signals, strengthened implementation sup-port, and explicit attention to affordability and social justice.