Nicole Darnall

Why Firms Mandate ISO 14001 Certification

Thousands of facilities worldwide have certified to International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 14001, the international environmental management system standard, and previous research typically has studied these certification decisions at the facility level. However, significant anecdotal evidence indicates that firms may have a strong role, and if so, prior studies may be drawing inappropriate conclusions about the rationale for ISO 14001 certification. Drawing on institutional theory and the resource-based view of the firm, this study offers a conceptual framework that explains why parent companies would mandate—rather than simply encourage—their operational units to certify to ISO 14001. The framework is tested using survey data of corporate environmental managers. The results show that firms have a central role in nearly half of all facility-level certifications and that firms that mandate ISO 14001 endure greater external pressures and have stronger complementary resources and capabilities that support their organization-wide ISO 14001 policies.

Stakeholder Involvement in the Design of U.S. Voluntary Environmental Programs: Does Sponsorship Matter?

Voluntary environmental programs (VEPs) promise to provide firms and facilities additional flexibility in managing their environmental affairs while increasing internal efficiencies and improving their public image. Although stakeholder input is thought to improve program development, little is known about the extent that stakeholders are involved in the VEP design process. Based on a survey of 61 program managers, this research distinguishes between the intensity and diversity of stakeholder involvement and uses these two concepts to assess VEP development relative to government, industry and third-party sponsorship. Even in the absence of a mandate, all three sponsors include a variety of stakeholders in program design. While there is evidence that collaborative relationships are developing between sponsors and a range of stakeholder groups, variations in the intensity of involvement among sponsors suggest that some stakeholders may have disproportionate levels of influence in the design of VEPs.

The effect of ISO 14001 on environmental performance: Resolving equivocal findings

Previous research evaluating ISO 14001 certification has shown that it both increases environmental performance and has no effect. We hypothesize that the equivocal findings are due to two factors: institutional pressures arising from differences in regulatory settings across and within countries, and typical methodological approaches for addressing endogeneity. We examine these factors using facility-level data from the United States and Japan for two environmental impacts. After applying Altonji, Elder, and Taber’s (2005) method for dealing with the case where there are no potential instruments, we find evidence that the effectiveness of these environmental governance tools varies across countries and type of environmental impact being assessed.

Why Consumers Buy Green

Increasingly, consumers are becoming more knowledgeable about the environment and reflecting this knowledge in their decisions to buy green products. While previous research on the topic has generally examined green consumption related to a single product label, numerous questions exist about why consumers choose various green products and services. We address these concerns by examining individuals’ actual green consumption as it relates to their trust of various sources to provide them with environmental information, environmental knowledge, and personal affect towards the environment. These relationships are studied for a sample of more than 1,200 UK residents using multiple regression techniques. We show that individuals’ total green consumption is related to their trust of various sources to provide them with environmental information, environmental knowledge, and personal affect towards the environment. These findings have important implications to policy-makers and businesses alike as greater efforts are made to encourage more widespread green consumption.

Assessing Integrated Pest Management Adoption: Measurement Problems and Policy Implications

For more than a decade, the U.S. government has promoted integrated pest management (IPM) to advance sustainable agriculture. However, the usefulness of this practice has been questioned because of lagging implementation. There are at least two plausible rationales for the slow implementation: (1) growers are not adopting IPM—for whatever reason—and (2) current assessment methods are inadequate at assessing IPM implementation. Our research addresses the second plausibility. We suggest that the traditional approach to measuring IPM implementation on its own fails to assess the distinct, biologically hierarchical components of IPM, and instead aggregates growers’ management practices into an overall adoption score. Knowledge of these distinct components and the extent to which they are implemented can inform government officials as to how they should develop targeted assistance programs to encourage broader IPM use. We address these concerns by assessing the components of IPM adoption and comparing our method to the traditional approach alone. Our results indicate that there are four distinct components of adoption—weed, insect, general, and ecosystem management—and that growers implement the first two components significantly more often than the latter two. These findings suggest that using a more nuanced measure to assess IPM adoption that expands on the traditional approach, allows for a better understanding of the degree of IPM implementation.

Can Ecolabels Influence Firms' Sustainability Strategy and Stakeholder Behavior?

Ecolabels are policies and programs that are designed to signal information to stakeholders about a product’s attributes and reduce stakeholder uncertainty about the validity of green product claims. However, for ecolabels to be successful at addressing information asymmetries external stakeholders must perceive them as being credible. We assess the prospects of different sorts of ecolabels to influence firms’ sustainability strategies and stakeholder behavior based on the credibility of their institutional construction. We then describe important areas for future ecolabel research, and analyze connections between these future research areas and the articles that form this issue. Finally, we emphasizethe importance of collaborative stakeholder initiatives in advancing sustainability strategy and how accurate information is vital to the success of these initiatives.

Strategic Alliances for Environmental Protection

Existing scholarship regarding strategic alliances has been limited by the tendency to view alliance formation through a single theoretical lens and to focus solely on the economic aspects (e.g., acquisition of capabilities) of narrowly defined relationships. As yet, there has been little attention paid toward examining how strategic alliances—of all sorts—can address social, economic and environmental issues. This chapter addresses these concerns by integrating the resource-based view of the firm with institutional theory to assess firms’ decisions to participate in a strategic alliance. Drawing on these motivations, this chapter articulates a framework to characterize strategic alliances based on their competency- and legitimacy-orientation. A conceptual model is then constructed to examine the extent to which these strategic alliances are likely to encourage firms to adopt more (or less) proactive environmental strategies.

All are not created equal: assessing local governments’ strategic approaches towards sustainability

ABSTRACT While local governments often implement equivalent numbers of sustainability programmes, they likely utilize different strategies to design them. We posit that some local governments pursue more of an exploration strategy, by experimenting with a broad range of sustainability issues and policy instruments to address them, while others pursue a more exploitation strategy, by focusing on a limited range of sustainability issues and policy instruments. We assess these distinctions across 70 local governments and offer evidence that governments indeed vary in their sustainability strategies. Such variations have important implications for local governments’ ability to improve their sustainability conditions over time.

Environmental Purchasing in the City of Phoenix

US local governments purchase US

Five Reasons Why Green Technology Firms Should Care About Sustainable Public Purchasing

1.72 trillion of goods and services annually that contribute to global climate change and other environmental problems. Cities that successfully implement environmental purchasing policies can mitigate these environmental concerns while saving money and demonstrating their environmental leadership. However, cities confront numerous challenges when implementing an environmental purchasing policy. This chapter identifies the facilitators and barriers of implementing an environmental purchasing policy. It draws on the experiences within the City of Phoenix as an example and offers eight recommendations for how the City of Phoenix and similar cities can integrate environmental purchasing more fully into their existing purchasing processes.