Abstract
The question of how organisations choose their environmental strategy remains an unsolved problem in institutional theory. We argue that institutional pressure and the characteristics of the firm affect choices around environmental strategies. An empirical analysis of 597 heavily polluting firms indicates that more firms choose environmental leadership strategies, which means that they actively work with upstream and downstream firms to reduce emissions, when government pressure is the greatest; however, more companies are likely to choose pollution prevention strategies, which implies recycling materials in the production process is implemented, when public pressure is the greatest. Finally, organisations with more redundant resources and strong asset specificity are more prone to choose environmental leadership strategies as policy pressure or public pressure increases. The findings offer a decision-making framework to promote environmental measures related to government policy formulation and public participation. The results can also provide empirical evidence to guide environmental strategic choices for heavily polluting enterprises.
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Data availability
The datasets used in the study are available from the corresponding author upon request.
Notes
2018 China Ecological and Environmental Status Bulletin
In September 2010, the Ministry of Environmental Protection published the Guidelines on Environmental Information Disclosure of Listed Companies (draft for comments) that addressed the following 16 heavily polluting industries: thermal power, iron and steel, cement, aluminium, coal, metallurgy, chemicals, petrochemicals, building materials, papermaking, brewing, pharmaceuticals, fermentation, textiles, leather, and mining. All the enterprises in these 16 industries are classified as heavily polluting enterprises.
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Funding
This study is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 72002013, No. 71874029), Project of Beijing Municipal Education Commission (No. SM202111417005), and Academic Research Projects of Beijing Union University (No. XP202010, No. SK40202101, No. JS10202005).
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Sen Wang and Jianhua Yin conceived the study and were responsible for the design and development of the data analysis. Xiaomei Zhu was responsible for data collection and analysis. All authors read and approved the final submitted manuscript.
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Wang, ., Yin, J. & Zhu, X. Heterogeneous choices of environmental strategies for heavily polluting firms under institutional pressure in China. Environ Sci Pollut Res 29, 7614–7626 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-021-16090-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-021-16090-9