How can local governments in the absence of national regulations or incentive schemes motivate private owners of post-war mass-housing for investments into ambitious retrofitting for energy efficiency? The million-program houses’ lifecycle currently makes renovations necessary and this would be an excellent opportunity to realize an upgrading of their energyefficiency status. Private owners do however show no inclination to do so. An intertwined array of barriers towards energy-efficient renovation is explored in this study, while it seeks to find out which new drivers are needed to overcome these barriers and create an intrinsic motivation for the owners to undertake the anticipated investments. In an exploratory case study, these points are investigated in the context of the exemplifying case of the Bygga om Dialogen project in Malmö, Sweden. Bygga om Dialogen, is reframing the situation of investments into energy-efficiency in a broader socio-economic context and thrives to create new drivers pushing the owners to undertake the investments via the tools of strategic niche management and reflexive governance. This study explores how a strategic niche management and reflexive governance can be used to motivate a variety of stakeholders to scrutinize and reconsider their assumptions of the renovation-business-case and how this can stimulate the owners to actively contribute to the establishment of a new, innovative, cross-sectoral approach seeking to realize energy-efficient investments in the context of holistic sustainable development in the neighborhood of Lindängen. Additionally it is explored how strategic niche management can be used to deal with the contextual, strategic and institutional uncertainties that the established network is facing. Ideally the vision of mutually realizing energy-efficient renovations as part of an inclusive socio-economic upgrading of the neighborhood, could act as a building block and exemplifying case for similar neighborhoods nationwide- or even all over Europe.