From eco-efficiency to eco-effectiveness? The policy-performance paradox

Mária Csutora ()
Additional contact information
Mária Csutora: Corvinus University of Budapest Department of Environmental Economics and Technology Budapest Hungary

Society and Economy, 2011, vol. 33, issue 1, 161-181

Abstract: The internalisation level of sustainability issues varies among topics and among countries. Companies give up less internalised issues for more internalised ones. Discrepancies between legal, market and cultural internalisation lead to different escape strategies: firms develop a high level environmental management system and they have nice sustainability policy and reports. These achievements cover the fact that their total emission keeps increasing and they do not proceed in solving the most crucial global community or corporate governance problems. ‘Escaper’ firms are often qualified as ‘leading’ ones, as a current stream of research is also ‘escapist’: it puts too much emphasis on sustainability efforts as compared to sustainability performance. Genuine strategies focus on hardcore sustainability issues and absolute effects rather than on issues easily solved and having high PR effects. They allow for growth in innovative firms, if they crowd out less efficient or more polluting ones. They produce positive environmental value added when sector average eco-efficiency is used as benchmark and do not accelerate market expansion and consumerism

Keywords: trade-offs; sustainability; environmental strategies; multinational enterprises; environmental management systems; eco-efficiency (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D22 Q51 Q55 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
Note: The research has been supported by the Norwegian Financial Mechanism (project HU-0056).
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.akademiai.com/content/x54h544712446663/fulltext.pdf (application/pdf)
subscription

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:aka:soceco:v:33:y:2011:i:1:p:161-181

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
Akadémiai Kiadó Zrt., P. O. Box 245, H-1519 Budapest, Hungary
https://akjournals.com/

Access Statistics for this article

Society and Economy is currently edited by Szent-Iványi, Balázs

More articles in Society and Economy from Akadémiai Kiadó, Hungary
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kriston, Orsolya ().