The Sustainability Balanced Scorecard as a Framework for Eco-efficiency Analysis

To provide valuable support for successful decision-making, managers need a balanced set of financial and nonfinancial measures that represent different requirements, strategic goals, strategies, resources, and capabilities and the causal relationships between these domains. The balanced scorecard is such a measurement system. As an open system the balanced scorecard facilitates the consideration of sustainability issues. But enhanced balanced scorecards require a new type of data. This is where eco-efficiency analysis comes into play.
This article discusses the relationship between so-called sustainability balanced scorecards and eco-efficiency analysis. Eco-efficiency analysis not only provides a data source for sustainability balanced scorecards; in the perspective of environmental information systems it also serves as a link between the balanced scorecard and corporate environmental accounting systems so that eco-efficiency as a component of an environmental information system becomes an adapter with two interfaces, which are characterized in this article. The main focus is on the principle of cause and effect, its different forms, and the implications for the design of appropriate information system components.     

A proposal to explore the role of sustainability indicators in local governance contexts: The case of Palmela,Portugal

The actual use of sustainability indicators and their steering potential is constrained by the particularities of governance contexts, by institutional patterns and changes, by the different interpretations of what sustainable development means and entails, and by the tensions around the main values nurturing the positions of the most relevant actors. This paper proposes a normative conceptual framework to further explore the role of sustainability indicators in local governance contexts, and applies it to the Portuguese municipality of Palmela. It aims to contribute to a better understanding of how, why and in what circumstances the processes of developing and using indicators can be important steering mechanisms for governance for sustainability, particularly at the local level. The methods used include primary literature review and official documents and data, interviews to local public officers and qualitative analysis. Palmela provides insights on concrete government achievements through the implementation of sustainability indicators, but clearly shows how they are insufficient to foster innovative governance arrangements for sustainability. The normative framework enables the identification of successes and failures of developing and using sustainability indicators in improving local governance and ultimately in helping to achieve sustainability goals.     

Application of the BioCondition assessment framework to mine vegetation rehabilitation

A quantitative ‘scorecard’ is essential to provide both mine regulators and managers with a robust way of assessing what is ‘good’ vegetation rehabilitation and whether it is adequate to satisfy the regulatory and legal requirements of mine closure criteria and community expectations. The BioCondition framework (Eyre et al. 2011a, http://www.ehp.qld.gov.au/ecosystems/biodiversity/biocondition.html ) was applied as a scorecard to evaluate vegetation rehabilitation using largely locally native species at Meandu coal mine in Southeast Queensland. Benchmarks for vegetation condition attributes were developed from an amalgam of local reference vegetation types. To allow the appropriate, rather than aspirational evaluation of restoration for sites that were < 50 years old, the scoring system was adjusted to exclude the large trees and coarse woody debris attributes. Bearing in mind that assumptions of self‐sustainability will depend on the ‘fit’ of species to the local condition and the ongoing management of the communities, the use of spider web diagrams assists mine managers and regulators to clearly see where future management intervention can increase the BioCondition score.     

A Framework for Quantified Eco-efficiency Analysis

Eco-efficiency is an instrument for sustainability analysis, indicating an empirical relation in economic activities between environmental cost or value and environmental impact. This empirical relation can be matched against normative considerations as to how much environmental quality or improvement society would like to offer in exchange for economic welfare, or what the trade-off between the economy and the environment should be if society is to realize a certain level of environmental quality. Its relevance lies in the fact that relations between economy and environment are not self-evident, not at a micro level and not at the macro level resulting from micro-level decisions for society as a whole. Clarifying the why and what of eco-efficiency is a first step toward decision support on these two aspects of sustainability. With the main analytic framework established, filling in the actual economic and environmental relations requires further choices in modeling. Also, the integration of different environmental effects into a single score requires a clear definition of approach, because several partly overlapping methods exist. Some scaling problems accompany the specification of numerator and denominator, which need a solution and some standardization before eco-efficiency analysis can become more widely used. With a method established, the final decision is how to embed it in practical decision making. In getting the details of eco-efficiency better specified, its strengths, but also its weaknesses and limitations, need to be indicated more clearly.     

Corporate Social Responsibility: A Real Options Approach to the Challenge of Financial Sustainability

BackgroundIn contemporary complex societies, social values like ethics, corporate social responsibility, and being respectful with the environment, among others, are becoming social requirements. Corporations are expected to fulfill them and, according to empirical evidence, an overwhelming majority aspires to good social valuation. At the same time, the maximization of market share value in the long run continues to be the central corporate goal. Making environmental and social expenses compatible with value creation is a central challenge for corporations since it implies the financial sustainability of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR).

Methods and Results

The value creation capacity of CSR projects, mainly through innovation, is widely acknowledged in economic literature and corporate practice. This fact arouses the need of having a quantitative framework capable of summarizing the value creation capacity of the variables involved in CSR projects. With this aim we build up a sensitivity analysis of real option ratios that studies and quantifies the value creation capacity of CSR projects connected with innovation. Ratio analysis has the advantage of being scale independent. Hence, it furnishes a homogeneous framework to express the interaction of value creation variables and, thus, supports strategic thinking quantitatively. Often, CSR expenses can be regarded as preliminary projects that create the opportunity to undertake a full future project. For them, we obtain the minimum expectations scenario that makes financially sustainable a preliminary project that can be interpreted as a call option. We propose a classification of CSR projects from the decision analysis perspective following a two-fold approach: Their relationship with value creation and their links with existing corporate activities. This classification of CSR projects aims at contributing to choose the best capital budgeting method to study the financial sustainability of the project and identifying those CSR projects that fulfill the required features to be studied from the real options perspective.     

WHAT ‘EMPIRICAL TURN IN BIOETHICS’?

Uncertainty as to how we should articulate empirical data and normative reasoning seems to underlie most difficulties regarding the ‘empirical turn’ in bioethics. This article examines three different ways in which we could understand ‘empirical turn’. Using real facts in normative reasoning is trivial and would not represent a ‘turn’. Becoming an empirical discipline through a shift to the social and neurosciences would be a turn away from normative thinking, which we should not take. Conducting empirical research to inform normative reasoning is the usual meaning given to the term ‘empirical turn’. In this sense, however, the turn is incomplete. Bioethics has imported methodological tools from empirical disciplines, but too often it has not imported the standards to which researchers in these disciplines are held. Integrating empirical and normative approaches also represents true added difficulties. Addressing these issues from the standpoint of debates on the fact‐value distinction can cloud very real methodological concerns by displacing the debate to a level of abstraction where they need not be apparent. Ideally, empirical research in bioethics should meet standards for empirical and normative validity similar to those used in the source disciplines for these methods, and articulate these aspects clearly and appropriately. More modestly, criteria to ensure that none of these standards are completely left aside would improve the quality of empirical bioethics research and partly clear the air of critiques addressing its theoretical justification, when its rigour in the particularly difficult context of interdisciplinarity is what should be at stake.     

How Political Connections Affect Corporate Environmental Performance: The Mediating Role of Green Subsidies

This study investigates the relationship between political connections and corporate environmental performance, and examines the role of government green subsidies on this relationship within the current Chinese context. Using data from publicly traded private manufacturing firms, empirical results show that politically connected firms are significantly more likely to obtain green subsidies than non-connected firms. Assisted by green subsidies, firms with political connections show better environmental performance than those without. Our findings reveal the mechanism by which corporate political connections influence environmental performance.     

Meta-performance evaluation of sustainability indicators

There are many different kinds of frameworks for evaluating environmental and sustainability performance at the organizational level (profit or not-for-profit, private or public), sectoral level (e.g. industry, transport, agriculture and tourism), and local, regional or country levels. Despite the diversity of methods and tools to measure sustainable development, indicators are one of the approaches most used. However, these tools do not usually include evaluation of the performance measurement instrument itself. The main objective of this research is to develop a conceptual framework to design and assess the effectiveness of the sustainability indicators themselves. To put the proposed tool into practice, a set of key good-practice factors and meta-performance evaluation indicators is proposed for adoption in a national case study—the national sustainable development indicators system, SIDS Portugal, and the usefulness of this methodology is demonstrated. This approach aims to evaluate how appropriate a set of sustainability indicators is and allow an evaluation of overall performance-monitoring activities and results. Stakeholder involvement is an essential component of the proposed framework. The tool developed could support continuous improvement in the performance of ongoing sustainability indicator initiatives, allowing greater guidance, objectivity and transparency in sustainability assessment processes.     

Corporate sustainability for architecture engineering and construction (AEC) organizations: Framework,transition and implication strategies

This research aims to propose a regenerative sustainability framework for AEC organizations, not only to focus on delivering green certified projects, but to encourage a revitalized approach to systematically drive their sustainability initiative. To achieve this aim, the study conducts an extensive global review of sustainable assessment systems in various industries and organizations, such as corporate sustainable reports, green company competitions, and green-renowned stocks. After learning the best practices from other industries, a sustainable development framework for the AEC organizations is developed. The proposed framework constitutes 110 key indicators covering three-dimensions of sustainability—social, environmental, and economic, respectively—and four-elements of corporate development essentials—projects, operations, governance, and stakeholders. By comparing the proposed framework to existing AEC practices, the study identifies the skewed development of corporate sustainability in the AEC industry where much awareness have been given to project-level environmental matters, but the social dimension, such as social stakeholders and social governance, are seriously lacking and need to be prioritized. A case study of a multi-millions construction company in China was investigated to validate this framework in practice. The case analysis justifies the practical value of the proposed framework, and elaborates the future need of regenerative sustainable initiatives for AEC organizations. The study contributes to the development of corporate sustainability theory in the AEC industry, and also provides industrial practitioners and policy makers with a better understanding of the next generation of corporate sustainable performance and implementation strategies.     

Cultural values on CSR patterns and evolution: A study from the biplot representation

Based on institutional and stakeholder theory, this study aims to observe the influence the cultural system has on the degree of responsibility of business behaviour and examines how normative isomorphism influences the Corporate Social Responsibility practices at the country level. We use the Hofstede model because its dimension group highlights the cultural similarities and differences between countries, and we measure CSR along five indicators referring to environmental and social dimensions. This study contributes to the literature by adopting a multi-region approach considering a sample of 6600 observations of 600 publicly-listed companies headquartered in 18 countries in Europe, North America, Japan and Australia, during the period 2004–2014. Given the multidimensional character of the data, we use the exploratory statistical techniques X-STATIS and HJ-biplot, since this allows us to approximate a large group of variables in a low-dimensional space, providing us with a useful visualisation of the structure of the data of the sample relative to the variables. Our main conclusion is that cultural dimensions exert important pressures on firms and their commitment, so, companies located in collectivist societies and, even more, in feminist ones, are characterised by the pursuit of the common good and place greater emphasis on social and environmental issues, thereby showing best CSR practices. Overall, the data does point to more activity in Northern than in Southern Europe, and show that companies respond to what is important in their own countries; for example, the Nordic countries give priority to social policies, while Japanese companies are more committed to the environment. Finally, our results evidence that companies worldwide adopt similar patterns of CSR practices, but their degree of development is strongly determined by the normative institutional characteristics.     

Sustainability governance service providers: the role of third-party product certification in facilitating corporate life cycle management

Purpose

This article aims to analyze the role that third-party product sustainability certifications play in supply chain sustainability governance and hence the impact that they may have on facilitating corporate life cycle management (LCM). Particular emphasis is given to exploring the extent to which such schemes allow firms to outsource the work of communication, motivation, enablement, and control of sustainability-related information and performance upstream in the supply chain.

Methods

The research design is based on a comparative case study methodology. The corporate practices of sourcing the sustainability certified products in the food retailing and textile sectors are compared, to explain when third-party product sustainability certification reduces the corporate need to engage in collaborative relationships with suppliers, thereby reducing efforts associated with implementation of corporate life cycle management.

Results and discussion

In our study, we found evidence that affirms the role of third-party product sustainability certification in reducing corporate necessity to actively engage with coordination of sustainability issues upstream in the supply chain. However, we also identified a range of factors—the intention of the buying company, the supply chain context, and the design of the certification scheme—that influence the extent, to which third-party product sustainability certification replaces the corporate need for additional work to facilitate supplier compliance. Some of these factors, e.g., the design of the certification scheme, are new and have been underexplored in the supply chain management and value chain governance literature yet.

Conclusions

Our findings suggest that corporate LCM practitioners should consider third-party sustainability certification as an instrument for the transfer of significant life cycle information along the supply chain and as a tool to facilitate corporate life cycle management. The extent to which third-party product sustainability certification would be able to facilitate corporate life cycle management depends not only on whether certification requirements are based on the LCA studies but also on the market scope of the certification schemes, the scope of the certification requirements, and the architecture of the certification management services. If these parameters are aligned with corporate ambitions and allow buyers to fully outsource the work associated with communication, motivation, enablement, and control of sustainability-related information and supplier performance, the life cycle management can be exercised by companies by simply choosing to procure sustainability certified products.

     

Is “going green” good to all? Evidence from South Korea

Abstract

Stakeholders have heterogeneous expectations and demands for corporate environmental responsibility (CER). Going green may cause potential conflicting-interests among stakeholders, because stakeholders who benefit from environmental-management endorse making and implementing environmental-friendly policies. In contrast, stakeholders who bear the costs of a firm’s corporate greening may not support CER initiatives. Firms with differentiated strategic-orientation, which reflect preferences of select stakeholders (controlling families, consumers, and employees), exhibit different perception of and response to CER. Using a panel dataset of South Korean manufacturing firms from 2011 to 2015, this study investigates benefits and costs of CER by exploring relationships among family owned and managed, consumer-oriented, employee-oriented firms, and corporate environmental performance (CEP). Our empirical results show that family owned and managed and employee-oriented firms are less likely to engage in environmentally friendly management. This activity occurs because corporate greening may damage these firms’ interests, such as controlling family shareholders’ private wealth and their employee’s work-life balance.     

Extending eco-evolutionary theory with oligomorphic dynamics

Understanding the interplay between ecological processes and the evolutionary dynamics of quantitative traits in natural systems remains a major challenge. Two main theoretical frameworks are used to address this question, adaptive dynamics and quantitative genetics, both of which have strengths and limitations and are often used by distinct research communities to address different questions. In order to make progress, new theoretical developments are needed that integrate these approaches and strengthen the link to empirical data. Here, we discuss a novel theoretical framework that bridges the gap between quantitative genetics and adaptive dynamics approaches. ‘Oligomorphic dynamics’ can be used to analyse eco-evolutionary dynamics across different time scales and extends quantitative genetics theory to account for multimodal trait distributions, the dynamical nature of genetic variance, the potential for disruptive selection due to ecological feedbacks, and the non-normal or skewed trait distributions encountered in nature. Oligomorphic dynamics explicitly takes into account the effect of environmental feedback, such as frequency- and density-dependent selection, on the dynamics of multi-modal trait distributions and we argue it has the potential to facilitate a much tighter integration between eco-evolutionary theory and empirical data.     

Economic Development Matters: A Meta‐Regression Analysis on the Relation between Environmental Management and Financial Performance

Although the existing body of empirical literature on the relation between corporate environmental performance (CEP) and corporate financial performance (CFP) is continuously growing, results are still inconclusive about this fundamental question in industrial ecology. Comparisons are difficult because of various estimation methods as well as the overall heterogeneous and complex interaction between the two constructs, but especially because of country‐specific data sets. Consequently, we raise the question of whether regional differences are the driving force buried underneath the inconclusiveness. Therefore, the aim of this article is to explore this heterogeneity by aggregating 893 existing results from 142 empirical primary studies that are based on more than 750,000 firm‐year observations. Our findings suggest a convex impact of a country's economic development on the magnitude of the CEP‐CFP effect (i.e., the effect is positive in developing countries, disappears in emerging countries, and is again positive in highly developed countries). We also find that the overall positive relation strengthens for market‐based CFP measures and diminishes for countries with civil law systems, firms from the service sector, reactive environmental activities, and process‐based CEP measures. Further, several aspects of the examined data sample and the inclusion of relevant control variables explain heterogeneity in previous research results.     

Do human ‘life history strategies’ exist?

Interest in incorporating life history research from evolutionary biology into the human sciences has grown rapidly in recent years. Two core features of this research have the potential to prove valuable in strengthening theoretical frameworks in the health and social sciences: the idea that there is a fundamental trade-off between reproduction and health; and that environmental influences are important in determining how life histories develop. However, the literature on human life histories has increasingly travelled away from its origins in biology, and become conceptually diverse. For example, there are differences of opinion between evolutionary researchers about the extent to which behavioural traits associate with life history traits to form ‘life history strategies’. Here, I review the different approaches to human life histories from evolutionary anthropologists, developmental psychologists and personality psychologists, in order to assess the evidence for human ‘life history strategies’. While there is precedent in biology for the argument that some behavioural traits, notably risk-taking behaviour, may be linked in predictable ways with life history traits, there is little theoretical or empirical justification for including a very wide range of behavioural traits in a ‘life history strategy’. Given the potential of life history approaches to provide a powerful theoretical framework for understanding human health and behaviour, I then recommend productive ways forward for the field: 1) greater focus on the life history trade-offs which underlie proposed strategies; 2) greater precision when using the language of life history theory and life history strategies; 3) collecting more empirical data, from a diverse range of populations, on linkages between life history traits, behavioural traits and the environment, including the underlying mechanisms which generate these linkages; and 4) greater integration with the social and health sciences.     

Corporate environmental performance,environmental information disclosure,and financial performance: Evidence from China

As pollution emitters and energy users, firms are important causes of environmental problems, making it increasingly vital for them to strengthen their environmental management and information disclosure policies. However, firms doubt whether it pays to be green and whether it is worthwhile to disclose their environmental information, and there are hot debates on these questions in the literature. This paper analyzes the relationships among corporate environmental performance, environmental information disclosure, and financial performance in China, which witnessed rapid growth at the price of environmental degradation. With 950 observations from 475 Chinese listed companies between 2013 and 2014, we find a U-shaped nonlinear relationship between corporate environmental performance and environmental disclosure, an insignificant relationship between environmental performance and financial performance, and a negative relationship between environmental disclosure and financial performance, which is different from most findings in developed countries. The aforementioned results imply that Chinese firms have few motivations to disclose environmental information or improve environmental performance; therefore, mandatory disclosure of environmental information is necessary, and proper environmental policy should be made to punish environmental violations and encourage better environmental performance.