‘This is a wonderful book that should be on the desk of every architect and planner. It shows how

Ground rules for investments [Chapter 2]
The purpose of public-oriented projects is to make society better off (the Green Optimum).

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Positive Development
Therefore, public–private+community partnerships should be considered as vehicles for the design 
and implementation of a project. Agreements must ensure that business and government agencies 
cannot highjack the project after others have contributed labour and time. This requires some 
kind of formal cost-, risk- and profit-sharing. The partnership should also be structured to prevent 
‘unjust enrichment’. Once the agreed benefits and/or profits are distributed to the partnership 
members (community, business, government), extra profits should be re-invested in other Positive 
Developments. Some financially-related matters that should be sorted out early are:
•
Consideration of performance contracting, where a partnership would provide energy- 
efficiency services at little or no cost to clients and recover their costs and profits from the
reduced energy, water or sewage bills.
• 
Agreement at the outset that parties to a partnership should receive a portion of the benefits 
of cost savings after costs are recovered, and/or that some of these savings be put into a
separate fund to be rolled over to fund other eco-retrofitting projects.
• 
NGOs ensuring protection of their intellectual property, as often conventional community
participation is inadvertently used to transfer intellectual capital by government agencies
without remuneration.
• 
Linking designer’s fees, credits or awards to post-occupancy sustainability indicators,
perhaps on a sliding scale (or a percentage of fee withheld). Designer’s fees are usually tied 
to construction costs without much incentive for design achievement.
• 
Programme, action, policy and strategic prioritization of tried and tested, cost-effective eco- 
solutions that avoid negative impacts should be considered before hi-tech solutions, capital- 
intensive approaches are adopted.