Evolution of the environmental standard in real estate : the green lease' example

Arisen from the contractual Anglo-Saxon practice and codified in France thanks to the Grenelle Laws', the green lease contract aims at improving the environmental and energy performance of a commercial building.

At the international level, this contractual tool constitutes an element of the struggle policy against human greenhouse gas emissions that has been claimed in the late 1990's by the UN and the EU. Beyond its legitimacy, the implementation of the green lease points out diverging interests, varied conceptions of sustainability, multiple rights of property usage, revealing the duality subject/object expressed on the urbanization phenomena between man and nature. As the green lease is a child of economic liberalism, it reveals the discrepancies of sustainability in the real estate sector. It is the fruit of an heighten anthropisation and turns out to be a soft standard, harsh to implement in France.

Recovering the legal usefulness of the green lease involves a disenchantment of the mediatized presumptions towards sustainability so as to access to the knowledge of its must-be' contractual. This catharsis of the principle is imperative to re-establish the efficiency of the state-of-being' of the contract, i.e. the consent of landlords, tenants and facility managers around the same project of environmental improvement.

Nonetheless, this type of contract won't be able to recover its target without the compelling intercession of the superstructural institutions committed in establishing the binding nature of the environmental norm. This thesis works on provoking a doctrinal interest for this new embranchment of the law (sustainability in real estate), but also on suggesting to the legislator a genuine admittance process of the French green lease status. This thesis invites the norm producers to reconsider the legal practice of sustainability in the city by implementing leverages that generate a new legal paradigm.