1 - Introduction

Summary

In the early 1990s when “green” businesses were seldom observed in the US and the very idea of “green and competitive” was considered on the cutting edge of management practices, “eco-lodges” were already very popular in Costa Rica. Indeed, at that time the symbiosis between hotels and Costa Rica's world-class national parks was yielding one of the most impressive examples of hotel industry prosperity directly linked to proactive business environmental protection. Conversely, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the US ski resort industry was showing strong resistance to new environmental regulation demands and to the protection of biodiversity in US national forest lands. At first glance, this dynamic may seem paradoxical: higher beyond-compliance environmental protection by businesses in a developing country much poorer than the US. To understand this apparent paradox, this book provides a framework of analysis and empirical studies developed over a period of more that ten years in collaboration with several outstanding colleagues. More generally, in this book I contribute towards providing answers to three broad research questions that continue to attract the attention of a large number of scholars, policymakers, and managers interested in environmental and social protection issues:

1. (1) How are the stages of the environmental and social protection policy process linked to different levels of business resistance?

2. (2) How does country context affect the level of resistance shown by business to environmental and social protection policy demands?

3. (3) How do firm-level characteristics affect the environmental and social protection policy process–business response relationship?