آیا ایزو 14001 دروازه ای به اقدام داوطلبانه پیشرفته تر است؟ مورد مدیریت زنجیره تامین سبز

Using Japanese facility-level data, we estimate the effects of ISO 14001 certification on the promotion of more advanced practices, namely green supply chain management (GSCM). Our results show that ISO 14001 promotes GSCM practices. Facilities with environmental management systems (EMS) certified to ISO 14001 are 40% more likely to assess their suppliers' environmental performance and 50% more likely to require that their suppliers undertake specific environmental practices. Further, government programs that encourage voluntary EMS adoption indirectly promote GSCM practices. These programs increase the probabilities that facilities will assess their suppliers' environmental performance and require suppliers to undertake specific environmental practices by 7% and 8%, respectively. Combined, these findings suggest that there may be significant but previously unnoticed spillover effects of ISO 14001 and government promotion of voluntary action.

An increasing number of governments have started to promote voluntary actions by private corporations to achieve their environmental goals. The popularity of this approach stems from the fact that voluntary actions often are more acceptable to the private sector than prescriptive mandates or economic instruments like pollution taxes and emissions trading. Moreover, government-encouraged voluntary approaches can be less costly than traditional command-and-control systems, which generally impose a significant administrative burden on regulators for monitoring and enforcement. Partly because of governments' promotion, voluntary actions are becoming more common among industrial facilities. One of the more widely used voluntary actions involves an environmental management system (EMS). Industrial facilities that adopt EMS systematically develop an environmental policy, evaluate their internal processes that affect the environment, create objectives and targets, monitor progress, and undergo management review. In particular, ISO 14001, the EMS standard designed by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), has received growing attention. By December 2008, more than 982,800 facilities worldwide had been certified to the standard [15]. Because of the popularity of ISO 14001, researchers have begun to examine the factors that motivate facilities to adopt ISO 14001 and its effect on their environmental performance. These studies have found that the adoption of ISO 14001 is influenced by facility size, export ratio, debt ratio, stakeholders' environmental preferences and pressures, and facilities' financial flexibility [22] and [23]. They also have found that greater regulatory pressure leads to early uptake of ISO 14001 [7], [18], [24] and [25]. In terms of the effectiveness of ISO 14001 adoption, the research findings are equivocal. On the one hand, some studies show that ISO 14001 certification can reduce an industrial facility's environmental impacts [2], [20] and [24] and improve its compliance with environmental regulations [25]. On the other hand, some studies find little evidence that ISO 14001 improves facilities' environmental performance [3], [9] and [18].1 A commonality among previous studies that assess the effectiveness of ISO 14001 is that they measure environmental performance only for the facility that adopts the EMS standard. But even if an adopter of ISO 14001 does not directly improve its environmental performance, its adoption might affect the environmental actions of other organizations. For example, ISO 14001-certified facilities may be more likely to implement green supply chain management (GSCM) practices and thus assess suppliers' environmental performance when making their purchasing decisions. It is also possible that certified facilities may be more likely to attempt to green their supply chain by requiring that their suppliers undertake particular environmental measures [8]. However, examining the complex nature of these potential spillover effects of ISO 14001 has been largely overlooked in the literature. Additionally, although previous studies [2] show that government-promoted voluntary approaches can help reduce facilities' environmental impacts, they have not considered how ISO 14001 and other programs may indirectly encourage GSCM. To our knowledge, this is the first paper to examine the multifaceted relationship between facilities' ISO 14001 certification and GSCM practices. In particular, using Japanese facility-level data from a survey conducted by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), we estimate the effects of ISO 14001 certification on the promotion of GSCM practices. Further, we assess the extent to which government-sponsored assistance programs that encourage facilities to adopt ISO 14001 also influence them to adopt GSCM practices. We find the effects of ISO 14001 on GSCM practices to be quite large. Facilities with ISO 14001 are about 40% are more likely to assess their suppliers' environmental performance than facilities without ISO 14001 and 50% more likely to require that their suppliers undertake specific environmental practices. We also show that policies that encourage facilities to adopt EMS are indirectly related to the implementation of GSCM practices. Specifically, the availability of government-sponsored programs that encourage facilities to use EMS make it 7% more likely that facilities will also assess their suppliers' environmental performance and make it 8% more likely that facilities will also require their suppliers to undertake specific environmental practices. The fact that ISO 14001 promotes GSCM practices suggests the possibility of ISO 14001's positive externality: If a facility assesses its suppliers' environmental performance and requires them to undertake environmental measures, suppliers may subsequently improve their environmental performance. If so, ISO 14001-certified facilities play a role in reducing environmental impacts outside their production process. Additionally, government programs that promote the use of a voluntary EMS may encourage broader environmental improvements within private business. Our results therefore suggest that the effectiveness of ISO 14001 and the benefit from government-promoted voluntary actions may be far greater than previously considered.

Using Japanese facility-level data, we estimated the effects of ISO 14001 certification on the promotion of more advanced environmental practices, namely green supply chain management. We find that ISO 14001 promotes GSCM practices. Facilities with ISO 14001 are 40% more likely to assess their suppliers' environmental performance and 50% more likely to require that their suppliers undertake specific environmental practices. In the presence of the causal link between ISO 14001 and GSCM practices, we have argued that ISO 14001 may positively affect the environmental performance of suppliers by way of GSCM. This argument is valid if suppliers respond to buyers' environmental performance assessments and requirements that they undertake specific environmental measures. However, there may be reasons why these suppliers' environmental performance does not improve. For instance, a facility may choose a particular supplier specifically because this supplier already adheres to certain criteria for environmental management. If so, GSCM practices may induce no change in the supplier's environmental behavior. Even in this case, however, a facility's change of its supplier to one that is already green would still increase the overall share of the market obtained by clean suppliers, which should provide incentives for other suppliers to change their practices. In this regard, GSCM still has the possibility of being a positive externality or spillover to ISO 14001. Further, we find that a government policy of encouraging EMS adoption indirectly influences ISO 14001 adopters to implement GSCM practices. Specifically, government assistance programs make it 7% more likely that ISO 14001 adopters will assess their suppliers' environmental performance and 8% more likely that ISO 14001 adopters will require their suppliers to undertake specific environmental practices. This evidence supports the idea that encouraging facilities to behave in an environmentally friendly way may be effective in addressing environmental problems. Though our study is the first attempt to shed light on the spillover effects of facilities' voluntary actions, data limitations make it impossible for us to examine the effects of ISO 14001 on the environmental performance of adopters' suppliers. Therefore, one fruitful avenue for future research is to examine the environmental performance of facilities operating within the supply chain to determine whether buyers' GSCM practices lead to measurable improvements among their suppliers. We also hope that demonstrating the relationship between ISO 14001 and GSCM stimulates other scholars to consider whether these relationships exist among other international settings and whether ISO 14001 might encourage other types of advanced environmental practices as well. GSCM may require an organization's suppliers to spend additional resources on improving their environmental performance. One may therefore argue that beyond some point, the marginal costs of suppliers reducing their environmental impacts could exceed the overall benefit to the supplier and to society. While this situation seems unlikely at the early stages of GSCM diffusion, it is another area of important future research.