Environmental and managerial information for cleaner production strategies: An environmental management development perspective

Abstract

This paper examines the uses and characteristics of environmental and managerial information for cleaner production (CP) strategies to achieve corporate sustainability from an environmental management development perspective. Based on a development stage model, an analytical framework was developed to identify the organizational uses and dimension characteristics of information for three different CP strategies, namely, efficiency, consistency and sufficiency. Based on twelve case studies of businesses in Sri Lanka, the uses and characteristics of information are explored at three different environmental management development stages (i.e. functional specialization, internal integration and external integration). Overall, the study found that the organizations at the functional specialization stage, with limited information uses and characteristics, adopt a narrow view of CP strategies by associating them with efficiency. As organizations progress to higher stages of environmental management development, the information uses and characteristics for CP are expanded to encapsulate sufficiency and consistency strategies while strengthening the efficiency uses. Further, the findings show that limited uses and characteristics of information in some respects such as for pricing decisions, internal reporting of environmental aspects (e.g. material, water and waste with the exception of energy) and external collaboration can undermine the efforts of companies to use CP strategies for corporate environmental sustainability.