Corporate participation in voluntary environmental compliance programs may have less to do with the package of costs and benefits that government agencies put together and more to do with the companies' internal culture, say the authors of a new Harvard University study.
What is less clear is whether programs such as U.S. EPA's National Environmental Performance Track encourage companies to do more than they would normally do to improve their environmental behavior, according to the study , titled "Beyond Compliance: Business Decision Making and the U.S. EPA's Performance Track Program." Such findings may be important lessons for government agencies as they decide how to encourage better environmental performance by more U.S. companies, the study concludes.
"What we've found is that it's not so much what the EPA does, but what certain companies need -- some companies have a propensity to seek this kind of recognition," said Jennifer Nash, a co-author of the study and the director the Kennedy School of Government's Regulatory Policy Program. "They may not be the best performers, but it's a certain sort of extroversion that makes an individual or company go for the gold star."
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