Environmental Priorities for the District of Columbia: A Report to the Summit Fund

This paper examines and ranks the District of Columbia's environmental problems. Four criteria are used to determine each problem's severity: public opinion of the problem, health effects, the number of people affected, and ecological and welfare effects. Public opinion is measured via 345 city resident and 23 stakeholder interviews. Stakeholders included environmental experts familiar with issues in the District. Health and ecological effects are captured by analyzing both the EPA's and District of Columbia's environmental data. The results show that the top four problems facing the city, in order of importance, are: drinking water, air pollution, the Anacostia River, and lead poisoning. Several recommendations for resolving the District's problems are offered and including creating a separate D.C. Environmental Agency, applying for EPA grant monies, publishing a D.C. environmental report, fostering community cooperation, and increasing education about the environment.

Is ISO 14001 a Gateway to More Advanced Voluntary Action? A Case for Green Supply Chain Management

Using Japanese facility-level data, we estimate the effects of ISO 14001 certification on the promotion of more advanced practices, namely green supply chain management (GSCM). Our results show that ISO 14001 promotes GSCM practices, in that facilities with environmental management systems (EMS) certified to ISO 14001 are 40 percent more likely to assess their suppliers’ environmental performance and 50 percent more likely to require that their suppliers undertake specific environmental practices. Further, we find that government approaches that encourage voluntary EMS adoption indirectly promote GSCM practices, in that the probability of facilities’ assessing their suppliers’ environmental performance and requiring them to undertake specific environmental practices increases by 9 percent and 10 percent, respectively, if a government assistance program exists. Combined, these findings suggest that there may be significant but previously unnoticed spillover effects of ISO 14001 and government promotion of voluntary action.voluntary actions, positive spillover, environmental management systems, ISO 14001, green supply chain management, government assistance programs, environmental impacts, discrete choice model, endogeneity

Advancing Green Purchasing in Italian Municipalities

Italy was the first European country to create a full mandatory plan known as the National Action Plan on Green Public Procurement. This plan established a framework through which green purchasing polices can diffuse throughout Italian municipalities. A primary reason for this action is that green purchasing policies have the potential to significantly reduce carbon impacts across the globe and can help Italy achieve its carbon emissions goals. However, at the local level, many municipal governments have struggled to implement green purchasing policies. Consequently, green purchasing has not reached its full potential to help municipalities mitigate their environmental impacts. These are significant concerns that the United Nations Environmental Programme, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, the Sustainable Purchasing Leadership Council (SPLC), and others suggest must be resolved if Italy is to move toward an environmentally sustainable economy. Researchers at Sant’ Anna School of Advance Studies’ Institute of Management and Arizona State University’s (ASU’s) Sustainable Purchasing Research Initiative have sought to address these issues. Our three broad objectives are to: 1) Determine the facilitators and barriers to adoption and implementation of green purchasing policies in Italian municipalities 2) Recommend actions for advancing green purchasing practices more effectively 3) Encourage Italian municipalities that lack green purchasing policies to adopt and implement them within their jurisdictions. To accomplish these objectives, we conducted a national survey of finance, environmental, and municipal engineering directors in Italian municipalities. The survey generated 152 individual responses from 395 municipalities with 25,000 residents or more. These municipalities were representative based on their population size, income, and geographic dispersion by prefecture

Stakeholder Influences on the Design of Firms’ Environmental Practices

While prior literature has emphasized that stakeholders can influence a firm's decision to adopt environmental practices that lead to competitive advantage, most scholarship has assumed that stakeholders influence the design of firms' environmental practices similarly. We challenge this notion and suggest that stakeholders affect not only the decision to adopt environmental practices, but also managerial decisions about the design of these practices. We consider the case of firms' strategic decisions about the design of their environmental practices, and in particular their degree of comprehensiveness and visibility. We then develop a classification of four design strategies: movers and shakers, backroom operators, wannabes, and passivists. Using multinomial regression techniques for a sample of more than 1700 firms worldwide, our research shows that while stakeholders exert pressures on firms, managers' perceptions of these pressures vary, and these variations appear to influence the design of their environmental practices. These findings offer important evidence that the scope of stakeholders' influence appears more far reaching (and nuanced) than previously considered. Managers who respond to these influences may therefore be in a better position to satisfy stakeholder expectations, thus enhancing their organization's overall credibility

The Untold Stories of The Monon Bell: A Documentary

Produced by Grant Walters and Nicole Darnall, The Untold Stories of the Monon Bell: A Documentary follows the oldest college rivalry west of the Allegheny Mountains from the very beginning. From the first match-up between the Tigers and the Little Giants until this year\u27s game, the history of this rivalry is truly unmatched. Follow as the tears and cheers from the past 122 years are documented by past players and coaches, sharing the memories of their time on field