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continuous improvement in environmental performance, erecting management systems to
reach these goals and finally having these systems and their improvement programs
periodically audited by an outside, accredited certifier. If the certification program is
successful, the firms can then use a participation logo in certain, non-product
advertisement.
The first international EMS standard was the EU’s Eco-Management and Audit
Scheme (EMAS) which was open only to European firms. Shortly after its adoption in
1993, the private law body International Standards Organization (ISO) created its own
EMS called ISO 14001 which was global in scope. Both EMS standards, which are quite
similar in structure, were based on a British national standard and its influence is very
apparent in both standards. Although political scientists such as Virginia Haufler, Claire
Cutler and Ronnie Lipschutz have written fairly extensively about the rise of these private
authority schemes, their effects on firm behavior are not well understood. In this paper I
use adoption rates and content analyses of firms’ environmental policies as well as
interviews with firm environmental managers to examine the effects of EMS standards on
transnational corporations (TNCs). I argue that EMS schemes have been enormously
successful at disseminating a core set of largely British environmental norms and best
management practices to TNCs across the globe. The dissemination of these norms has
gone much further than participation rates in EMS schemes themselves would indicate.
Using a constructivist conceptualization of markets and market actors I argue that these
norms could potentially have a profound effect on corporate environmental governance,
although their effects on actual behavior at present are quite modest.
The paper proceeds as follows. The next section will outline the main
characteristics of the British environmental policy style, how this policy style led to the
environmental innovations of the 1990s and why these innovations became so influential
within international policymaking forum at the end of the decade. I will also introduce a
new the literature on private authority in international relations to describe these new
instruments as well as how this study seeks to add to that literature. Section three will
introduce the paper’s case study, environment management standards, and trace the
development of the two standards under study here, the EU’s EMAS scheme and ISO
14001. Using data on EMS adoption rates, a content analysis of firm environmental
Convention