Renewing environmental certification in times of crisis

Abstract

The certification of environmental management systems based on international meta-standards such as ISO 14001 and the Eco Management and Audit Scheme has become one of the most common environmental practices. Nevertheless, the financial and economic difficulties faced by many organizations raise the issue of certification renewal and may have an impact on the trends toward decertification recently observed, notably in the case of the later standard. Surprisingly, this issue remains almost unexplored in the literature. The objective of this paper is to analyze the intention to renew environmental certifications in time of crisis in light of the motivations, obstacles and benefits of this standard. For that purpose, correlation and regression analyses were used with data obtained from 361 Spanish certified firms. The novelty of the study lies in analyzing for the first time in the literature how the intention to renew environmental certifications is shaped by several factors within a context of deep economic crisis. The article contains practical implications for the stakeholders of third party environmental certification, notably managers and policy-makers.

Why Companies Do Not Renew Their EMAS Registration? An Exploratory Research

“…These findings are confirmed by Daddi et al (2014), who found out that the introduction of specific measures in order to facilitate access to ISO 14001 and EMAS moderately increases the number of certified firms [21]. An important aspect to consider is that these measures should be effective in the long run (such as tax incentives) in order to avoid abandonments after obtaining the incentive [53,61]. For small organizations, financial support together with simplification measures have a great impact and foster the maintenance of the registration [41,56,62].…”

“…Small firms are often reported as the category which faces major difficulties implementing EMSs [59], and this is mainly due to the lack of human and financial resources to invest [17,18,41,60]. Additionally, they are driven by a short-term orientation that does not allow the exploitation of the advantages of sustainability investments, which generally have a long-term payoff [53,59]. Other significant issues identified concern the lack of customers' interest in the EMS and the lack of recognition by public institutions [17,41].…”

“…On the other hand, the costs sustained to obtain EMAS are not significant in terms of the decision to maintain it in the future. Moreover, EMAS adoption seems to be mainly driven by public incentives: firms that received incentives have a higher likelihood to not renew it [53].…”

Research on inspection and certification industry based on dissipative structure theory

“…The implementation of quality management system was also researched [10][11][12][13] and the supervision of inspection and certification bodies was discussed [14][15][16]. Other standards and certifications were also explored [17][18][19][20]. Also, cartels and clubs, resource dependent and new institutionalism theories were used to explain the reasons for the widespread registration of standards [21].…”

The Adoption of Environmental Management Systems Based on ISO 14001, EMAS, and Alternative Models for SMEs: A Qualitative Empirical Study

“…Following the work by Boiral [23], other more recent works have focused in a more or less direct way on the study of the diverse adoption of standard-based EMSs [24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35]. In general terms these works have highlighted the important influence of the internal sources of motivation for the better internalization of the practices associated with the EMS in the certified organizations.…”