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The best example of EMS codes leading to a significant ratcheting up of actual
material environmental standards can found in the forestry sector. Here sector specific
codes were created to deal with an issue for which states have largely failed to find a
solution and which is widely held to be in a crisis situation, namely rapid deforestation.
The most prominent of these codes, the Forest Stewardship Council’s FSC label, was
created by environmental NGOs and draws on management systems and the continuous
improvement norm but married these procedural elements with stringent performance
standards (Cashore XX; Kollman 2002). Although national industry associations have
reacted by creating less stringent voluntary codes, the success of the FSC label worldwide
has put pressure on all forestry codes to include material standards. The result has been a
ratcheting up of forestry standards across numerous national jurisdictions in the absence
of state regulation. Although an isolated case at this point, the forestry industry example
shows that norms such as continuous improvement and EMS practices can be harnessed
by environmental groups to improve material standards in much the way Braithwaite and
Drahos’s modeling theory would suggest.
Conclusions
The literature on European environmental policy has done a good job of
describing the reasons behind the British turn in international environmental politics but
much less has been written about the policy outcomes that have followed in the wake of
this new found influence. Indeed many of the new policy instruments that the British
government shunted up to the international level including EMS schemes were greeted
with a fair amount of skepticism and in some corners out right cynicism. Regardless of
the intentions of British policymakers, the evidence presented in this paper strongly
suggests that EMS standards have had a very real impact on corporate environmental
governance. The speed with which British EMS norms and notions of environmental
best practice have been disseminated to large transnational corporations across the globe
in less than a decade is really quite remarkable. Continuous improvement in
environmental performance, environmental auditing and target setting have become part
of the lingua franca of environmental managers.
Convention