Journal
BUSINESS STRATEGY AND THE ENVIRONMENT
Volume 29, Issue 6, Pages 2842-2856Publisher
WILEY
DOI: 10.1002/bse.2547
Keywords
corporate sustainability; environmental policy; green building; green certification; self-regulation; symbolic certification
Categories
Funding
- National Science Foundation [1069138]
- Direct For Education and Human Resources
- Division Of Graduate Education [1069138] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
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Does voluntary participation in eco-certification become more substantive over time, or less? Although past research on voluntary programs suggests that later participants are more likely to greenwash by only symbolically adopting voluntary standards, theories of regulatory competition suggest a possible race to the top. We argue that participation in voluntary programs can facilitate competition that enables a race, and we advance a theory of self-regulatory competition to explain dynamics of participation in voluntary environmental programs. Under this perspective, environmental self-regulation may facilitate a race to the top, despite possibilities for purely symbolic adoption. Analyzing data from a voluntary green building certification program in the United States, we introduce a methodology to distinguish propensities for symbolic certification from more substantive environmental performance. Data demonstrate that later adopters invest additional resources to attain higher certification, becoming greener and suggesting a race to the top in a voluntary greenbuilding certification program.
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