Triggering business responses to climate policy in Australia

Abstract

The ‘Porter hypothesis’ predicts that well-designed environmental regulations will stimulate businesses to innovate to reduce their environmental impact for efficiency reasons. This article analyses the impacts and anticipation effects of Australia’s carbon price on firms’ carbon reduction activities, through survey data on 466 medium-to-large Australian businesses. We build upon the Porter hypothesis by demonstrating that the anticipated impact of regulation may be as important as its implementation in triggering environmental innovation, thus developing the notion of a ‘signal’ effect. JEL Classification: D22 and 033

Enabling environmental innovation via green supply chain integration: A perspective of information processing theory

“…Second, there may be other contingency factors (i.e. commitment, environmental dynamism, and dependence) that influence the correlation between GSCI and environmental innovation (Markey et al, 2021). It would be worthwhile to examine the moderating effect of these contingency factors in future research, such as CEO characteristics, resource orchestration capability, and environmental public opinion pressure (Williams et al, 2021).…”

Legal obstacles and possibilities for environmental bargaining in Australia

“…There are, of course, other creative legal options for regulating organisations and their emissions, including the use of corporate directors’ duties (McConvill and Joy, 2003) as well as consumer-based strategies involving corporate social responsibility (e.g., Rishi, 2022). These strategies do not involve the sphere of production, nor workers and trade unions, who, as the environmental bargaining literature shows (Huber, 2022), are key stakeholders, critical to the industrial change required to avert environmental disaster.…”

Ray Markey (03 February 1949–23 April 2022)

“…While Director of the Centre for Workforce Futures at Macquarie University, Ray continued researching and publishing on labour history and on voice and employee participation, while also embarking on funded research in relation to specific policy issuesincluding workers' compensation law, portable long service leave, superannuation governance, casual worker entitlements, and climate change (e.g. see Markey et al, 2013Markey et al, , 2014aMarkey et al, , 2014bMarkey et al, , 2015. As Deputy Director of the Research Centre, I worked alongside Ray during this time, and experienced his generous collegiality in bringing together people from diverse scholarly backgrounds and mentoring them in multi-disciplinary teams which could tackle complex policy problems.…”

“…Markey and O’Brien, 2021). He also continued examining issues to do with climate change and Australian workplaces, with colleagues including Joe McIvor, Chris Wright and others (Markey and McIvor, 2019; Markey et al, 2021). Most recently, this included research on union activism and environmental bargaining through the mechanism of enterprise agreements.…”