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EMAS and ISO 140 01 in the Ger man indus try e complements or substitutes?

Friederike Neugebauer*

Queen’s University Management School, University Road Belfast, BT7 1NN, Northern Ireland, UK

a r t i c l e i n f o

Article history:

Received 19 October 2011

Received in revised form

11 June 2012

Accepted 9 July 2012

Available online 1 August 2012

Keywords:

Environmental management systems

Standards

EMAS

ISO 14001

Complementarity

Competition

a b s t r a c t

The two environmental management system (EMS) standards EMAS and ISO 14001 have been available

in Europe for the last 15 years. ISO 14001 has been taken up at a much larger scale but many firms in the

German automotive and engineering industry have certified their EMSs according to both standards. Two

research questions are addressed: (i) What explains why companies adopt both EMAS and ISO 14001? (ii)

Are EMAS and ISO 14001 complements or substitutes? Based on 21 interviews with industrial and

institutional representatives, this study finds that, first, the two standards are adopted for completely

different reasons: while ISO 14001 is often done as a response to external pressure, EMAS tends to be

motivated internally. Second, it is argued that EMAS and ISO 14001 are likely in a situation of direct

competition at present which may well turn into complementarity in the future.

2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction

Since the 1990s, new environmental policy instruments have

developed which encompass a range of market-based instruments

and voluntary regulation. Environmental management systems

(EMS) belong to the ‘more flexible policy instrument(s)’ (Zito and

Egan, 1998) that arose in the wake of what Banerjee has termed

‘corporate environmentalism’, i.e. the ‘the recognition and integration of environmental concerns into a firm’s decision-making

process’ (Banerjee, 2002; see also Hillary and Thorsen, 1999). The

mid-90s saw the emergence of the two EMS standards...