Four Sustainability Paradigms for Environmental Management: A Methodological Analysis and an Empirical Study Based on 30 Italian Industries

Abstract

This paper develops an empirical methodology to consistently compare alternative sustainability paradigms (weak sustainability (WS), strong sustainability (SS), a-growth (AG), and de-growth (DG)) and different assessment approaches (LCA, CBA, and MCA) within alternative relationship frameworks (economic general equilibrium (EGE) and ecosystem services (ESS)). The goal is to suggest different environmental interventions (e.g., projects vs. policies) for environmental management at national, regional, or local levels. The top-down methodology is then applied to 30 interdependent industries in Italy for three pollutants and four resources during two periods. The industries were prioritized in terms of interventions to be taken to diminish pollution damage and resource depletion, whereas sustainability paradigms were compared in terms of their likelihood (i.e., WS > AG = DG > SS), robustness (i.e., AG > SS > DG > WS), effectiveness (i.e., SS > AG > DG > WS), and feasibility (i.e., SS > DG > WS > AG). Proper assessment approaches for projects are finally identified for situations when policies are infeasible (e.g., LCA in WS and SS, MCA in DG and SS within ESS, CBA in WS, and AG within EGE), by suggesting MCA in WS within ESS once ecological services are linked to sustainability criteria.

Environmental Proactivity and Environmental and Economic Performance: Evidence from the Winery Sector

“…There is, however, evidence to suggest that such an approach is wrong. According to literature, the reasons for why this relationship exists include eco-efficiency and eco-innovation [6].…”

“…In an increasingly competitive and more socially responsible setting, the generation of competitive advantages associated with sustainability is paramount for the survival of firms [6] in general and wineries in particular [73]. Sustainability is the path to finding economic, ecological, and social balance, resulting in prosperity and the capitalization of new resources [7].…”

“…Since the superordinate environmental proactivity (EP) construct can predict or explain more than 50% of all of its dimensions, in Chin's terminology the amount of construct variance that is explained by the model is substantial [5]. However, for endogenous constructs relating to the result, both for the economic (EcP) and environmental (EnP) constructs, the R 2 are around 10% which is the recommended minimum [6]. Finally, SRMR is a goodness of model fit measure for PLS [71], which answers the question of whether the correlation matrix implied by our model is sufficiently similar to the empirical correlation matrix.…”

“…Environmental corporate strategy could also represent a source of competitive advantage [4] not only in terms of eco-efficiency or cost reduction as a result of improved environmental performance and eco-innovation, for example, but also by differentiating a company from its competitors in terms of an improvement in the company's reputation for responsible management. Eco-efficiency and improved reputation focus on creating competitiveness through environmental or sustainable progress, thus enabling companies to act as driving forces for sustainable development [5,6].…”

A critical hermeneutic reflection on the paradigm-level assumptions underlying responsible innovation

“…Especially during the last quarter of the twentieth century, the concept was used by social scientists to bring forward new views on doing research qualitatively, often in areas that thus far were dominated by quantitative methods of doing social research (Burrell and Morgan 1979;Given 2008;Guba and Lincoln 1994;Morgan 2007). Besides in science, the concept also has been used in other domains, such as sustainability (Burns 2012;Stead and Garner Stead 1994;Zagonari 2016), policy-analysis (Burns et al 2009), management theory (Gladwin et al 1995) and innovation (Baldwin and von Hippel 2009;Howaldt et al 2016;Sundbo 1995).…”