Voluntary Corporate Environmental Initiatives: A Typology and Preliminary Investigation

Voluntary corporate environmental initiatives are any nonstatutory initiatives that aim at improving corporate environmental performance. These types of initiatives have emerged as an important new policy tool for environmental management in North America. The focus of this paper is on the merits and shortcomings of three major categories of voluntary initiative: self-regulation, the voluntary agreement, and the voluntary challenge. Using data collected from eighteen new and two previously documented case studies of voluntary initiatives, the authors present some of the key characteristics of these types of initiatives and speculate on their role in North America's environmental policy regime. Industry respondents in the case studies identified the threat of regulation, public image, financial considerations, and peer pressure as key motivating factors in their decision to participate in a voluntary initiative. From a policy perspective, issues of concern are the effectiveness of nonstatutory initiatives relative to regulations, the degree of flexibility that they offer, and the role of public involvement. It is concluded that considerable research is still needed to confirm the contentions of proponents or opponents of voluntary initiatives.