EMAS Regulation in Italian Clusters: Investigating the Involvement of Local Stakeholders

Abstract

The last revision of the EMAS (Eco Management and Audit Scheme) Regulation encouraged a cluster approach to increase the participation of the organizations and to involve local stakeholders in the commitment to sustainability. Our research activity intends to partially fill the literature gap in the field by investigating the Italian cluster approach to EMAS, characterized by the creation of a cluster Managing Committee (MC)—which can receive an EMAS Cluster Certificate—in order to improve the implementation of the scheme. We investigated the effectiveness of MCs actions on different stakeholder categories in the nine Italian clusters with EMAS Cluster Certificate. We present the results of a survey conducted through different stakeholder categories in the considered clusters. The main goals of the investigation are to determine the effectiveness of EMAS Certificate for: local stakeholder involvement, network creation, environmental performance improvement and the increase in EMAS single registration. We find that EMAS Cluster Certificate is perceived as effective in improving environmental performance of the area and enhancing cluster image. Despite the recognition of these positive aspects, few organizations showed interest in EMAS registration because of the costs involved and the lack of incentives available from public institutions

Promoting Sustainability through EMS Application: A Survey Examining the Critical Factors about EMAS Registration in Italian Organizations

“…The difference between strategic drivers and benefits (Table 4) is the highest (0.49), especially for the "Improvement of the relationship with customers/citizens". This finding is consistent with existing literature [53,57,58,62]. On the other hand, the difference in environmental and economic drivers and benefits is less evident, respectively 0.22 and 0.20 (Tables 5 and 6).…”

“…Given the European nature of EMAS, it does not add value in extra-UE markets, even after the introduction of EMAS Global [49,57,62]. Moreover, organizations in many cases declared difficulties in achieving an efficient communication of their efforts to external stakeholders (consumers and costumers), not allowing a competitive advantage on the market [53]. Concerning internal aspects, firms agree about the low normative simplifications and incentives offered with EMAS [49,57,60].…”

“…Concerning internal aspects, firms agree about the low normative simplifications and incentives offered with EMAS [49,57,60]. In addition, they do not perceive a positive differentiation in terms of inspections carried out by public authorities [49,53,57,62,64]. With reference to internal barriers to EMAS introduction, implementation costs represent a crucial obstacle for SMEs [17,51,57,62,64].…”

“…Some studies focused on specific countries, especially those in which EMAS is more widespread, like Germany [15,20,[46][47][48][49][50] and Italy [19,21,[51][52][53][54]. On the other hand, fewer analyses took into consideration several countries, giving a more general European overview on EMAS organizations [55][56][57][58][59][60][61].…”

“…(2014) realized a survey targeted to all Italian Clusters applying EMAS at a cluster level, finding that stakeholders perceive environmental performances improvement as the major positive outcome of its application [53].…”