Borck, Jonathan C.; Coglianese, Cary --- "Beyond Compliance: Explaining Business Participation in Voluntary Environmental Programs" [2011] ELECD 937; in Parker, Christine; Nielsen, Lehmann Vibeke (eds), "Explaining Compliance" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2011)

Book Title: Explaining Compliance

Editor(s): Parker, Christine; Nielsen, Lehmann Vibeke

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781848448858

Section: Chapter 7

Section Title: Beyond Compliance: Explaining Business Participation in Voluntary Environmental Programs

Author(s): Borck, Jonathan C.; Coglianese, Cary

Number of pages: 31

Extract:

7. Beyond compliance: explaining
business participation in voluntary
environmental programs
Jonathan C. Borck and Cary Coglianese*

In recent years government regulators have shown increasing interest in
encouraging businesses to participate in voluntary environmental pro-
grams and to practice environmental stewardship in ways that go beyond
what regulations require. In the US, for example, the federal Environmental
Protection Agency (EPA) has created numerous voluntary programs, such
as its National Environmental Performance Track, that have attracted
thousands of industry participants who make pledges to improve their
environmental performance. At the same time, researchers have worked to
understand how businesses respond to environmental regulations and why
some businesses in fact choose to go beyond compliance even though they
are not required to do so. A growing body of scholarship has suggested
that businesses base their environmental management decisions on factors
other than the direct threats of regulatory sanctions and thus may at times
be motivated to adopt socially valuable business practices even though
they face no government-imposed penalties for not doing so.
Existing research on the beyond compliance behavior of firms has,
however, tended to rely on small samples of facilities. To explore at a
broader scale the determinants of business behavior, we developed a
survey instrument that asked US managers to report on their facilities'
operations and participation in government-sponsored voluntary envi-
ronmental programs.1 Our survey sought to identify the characteristics
of facilities that are more likely to go beyond compliance with existing
environmental regulations and participate in voluntary ...