Lack of Stakeholder Influence on Pollution Prevention

Abstract

In a developing country context, this study explores environmental awareness, stakeholder influence strategies, and pollution prevention roles among 11 local, civil society groups (e.g., environmental nongovernmental organizations [NGOs] is one grouping; media and press is another grouping). A theoretical framework that builds on the social movement literature and is more inclusive of a developing country context is offered. In essence, awareness-raising is also considered a stakeholder influence strategy. Based on surveys conducted in Chittagong, Bangladesh, the results of this empirical study show that 10 of the 11 groups were environmentally aware; however, only the environmental NGOs were willing to influence the other groups. The environmental NGOs were actively raising awareness, but they were not directly influencing firms or the federal government on pollution prevention. These findings challenge the generalization of current stakeholder influence theory to a developing country context and raise concerns about the capacity of local civil society to encourage pollution prevention.

Analysis of Environmental Accounting and Reporting Practices of Listed Banking Companies in Bangladesh

“…Environmental information can be disclosed in various sections in the annual report, such as the table of contents, financial statements, separate sections, and the chairman's or director's message [44]. From Figure 3, we see that most companies studied made environmental disclosures in the table of contents, separate sections, or chairman's/director's message.…”

“…Although EAR is on the increase, few studies have explored sustainability, CSR, corporate ER, corporate social reporting, corporate human disclosure, and so on in developing countries [13,17,[22][23][24][25][40][41][42][43][44][45]. Teoh et al [46] conducted a study on environmental disclosure and financial performance of listed companies in Singapore, noting that environmental disclosures generally reflect firms' better financial performance.…”

“…The main sources of information are annual reports of listed companies on the Dhaka Stock Exchange (DSE). It is documented and widely accepted that the annual report is a common and popular means of communicating with stakeholders [24,44,47,[60][61][62][63][64][65]. Thus, banking sector environmental disclosure is the key focus of the study.…”

“…Twenty listed banks were selected (see Table 2) among 30 banking companies on the DSE (see Appendix A) based upon the availability of the annual reports from the website during the study period. Moreover, for a descriptive study, a minimum acceptable sample size was considered as 10% of the total population [44,66]. The sample size of the study represents 67% of the total population.…”

“…Furthermore, an analysis regarding the monetary or nonmonetary nature of disclosures was performed [51]. This method of measurement has been applied in several prior studies to quantify and describe disclosures [30,32,44,64,75].…”