Documents environmental protection 300 results

"he implementation of environmental standards can be facilitated by motivating workers with pro-social preferences. Therefore, we study if employees working for firms achieving registration for environmental-related standards are more likely to display positive attitudes towards their job, to be actively involved in their jobs and to donate effort. Using a French matched employer–employee database, we find that these “green employees” report a significantly higher perception of usefulness and equitable recognition at work. Besides, they are more likely to work uncompensated overtime hours. Finally, if the adoption of environmental standards is shown to have no direct influence on job involvement, we expose how it indirectly impacts job involvement through the mediation of employees' reported perception of usefulness and equitable recognition at work."

"A variety of innovative institutional forms have emerged within the context of voluntary attempts to address pressing social and environmental issues. Among such institutions, the prevailing wisdom is that those characterized as encompassing multi-stakeholder governance are generally seen as having greater legitimacy than other forms of voluntary action, and such institutions have proliferated as a result. At the same time, business-driven programmes that exclude societal stakeholder groups are believed to be increasingly emerging as competitors to multi-stakeholder-governed programmes. This paper explores the relationship between these two trends and, in particular, highlights the potential for competition between multi-stakeholder and business-driven programmes to lead to a diverse range of outcomes which are shaped by legitimation politics. This perspective emphasizes the open-ended and contingent nature of voluntary programme interactions and the importance of strategy and choice of voluntary programmes and their participants in shaping the institutional design of programmes. Drawing upon a review of prior research and an in-depth case study of business-driven voluntary programmes within the European multi-product retail industry, the study shows that one key implication of legitimation politicking is a divergence between the surface appearance of the governance of programmes and the programmes' actual institutional design."

"This paper looks at the compatibility between technological improvements at the micro-level and sustainability at the macro-level. The two main approaches to prevent environmental degradation are technological improvement and economic degrowth. How do we establish the sustainability of technological options? LCA-type analysis of the technology system, combined with economic cost analysis, offers a first integrated eco-efficiency score. However, such a technology analysis focuses on micro-level technology relations only, is usually too optimistic and ignores other constraints implied in a choice.
Fitting more comprehensive knowledge into the sustainability evaluation of options requires a unifying systematic framework, which is worked out in the present paper as a ten-step procedure. The integrative framework for empirical analysis is ultimately a comparative-static systems analysis at macro-level, not in a deterministic dynamic mode, which is impossible, but as a knowledge-fed scenario analysis. The analysis shows the change in society's overall eco-efficiency, combining total value creation with total environmental impacts.
Possible domains of application include not only technology choices like those in eco-innovation, including changed consumption styles and volumes, but also changes in policies regarding technologies and markets, whether direct policy shifts or indirect changes through institutional adaptations. Ultimately, such a framework also allows culturally framed questions about the type of society we would like to live in, to be analysed in terms of their economic and environmental consequences."

"The European Union today stands on the brink of radical institutional and constitutional change. The most recent enlargement and proposed legal reforms reflect a commitment to democracy: stabilizing political life for citizens governed by new regimes, and constructing a European Union more accountable to civil society. Despite the perceived novelty of these reforms, this book explains (through quantitative data and qualitative case analyses) how the European Court of Justice has developed and sustained a vibrant tradition of democratic constitutionalism since the 1960s. The book documents the dramatic consequences of this institutional change for civil society and public policy reform throughout Europe. Cichowski offers detailed empirical and historical studies of gender equality and environmental protection law across fifteen countries and over thirty years, revealing important linkages between civil society, courts and the construction of governance. The findings bring into question dominant understandings of legal integration. "