Sustainable construction has developed in the past few decades in the Netherlands to a mature subject of policy, research, and innovation. In the technological field the opportunities for sustainable construction seem to be unlimited. In practice, in the Netherlands, measures to give concrete form to sustainable construction are only scantily applied. The suspicion arises that it is not technical factors but institutional factors that underlie the fact that as yet sustainable construction has failed to force a definitive breakthrough. The authors review to what extent institutions that influence the decisionmaking of players in the building sector regarding whether or not to apply sustainable construction have hindered improvement in sustainable construction.