Environmental Management in European Companies Success Stories and Evaluation

Over the past decade, the greening of industry has become both an issue in scientific and political debate and a generic substantive development in industry itself. This study is the product of an international collaborative research project investigating exemplary cases of successful environmental management in European companies in Denmark, Germany, The Netherlands, Switzerland, Poland, and Latvia with the aim of discovering the reasons and dynamics underlying them and the role environmental policy did and could play. Providing the background and context of the research project, the nine case studies concern various companies of different sizes and from different industrial branches and describe the social processes leading to substantive environmental achievements and corresponding environmental management systems. This study also evaluates the success stories in a comparative empirical, as well as theoretical, perspective with an environmental policy orientation. Case studies examine the role of a company's internal and external determinants, explaining successful corporate environmental management on the micro-level.