University of Vaasa - Vaasan yliopisto

Table 4. Variables used to compute the MEPE index.
Description of variables
X1 – Existence of a coordinating structure for environmental matters;
X2 – Existence of a person in charge of the environmental management of
municipality facilities;
X3 – Staff submitted to training courses on the environmental management of local
government facilities;
X4 – Implementation of an EMS;
X5 – Environmental and/or sustainability information communicated through formal
reports;
X6 – Use of environmental performance indicators to measure, communicate and
report;
X7 – Environmental audit conducted in municipality facilities;
X8 – Use of environmental and/or sustainability criteria in local government public
purchasing;
X9 – Application submitted to the ECOXXI award system;
X10 – Implementation of LA21 or another type of Local Sustainable Development
Strategy.
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After this selection, a normalization procedure was used to transform the original
data of variables X into a single scale of continuous variation [0,…,1], which
allowed the aggregation process. This scale varies between 0 (the worst
environmental profile) and 1 (the best environmental profile).
The MEPE index was calculated using the following equation:
⎡
⎢
m ⎢⎣
MEPE=∑
(Eq.1)
Where,
j=
1
1
w
∑
∑
= ⎥ ⎥
n ⎤
Piw
i
i 1 ⎦
m
j
Pi = the value of the environmental practice variable i derived from the questionnaire,
which is given a relative weight w
n = the total number of variables i; i = 1,…,10
m = the total number of municipalities j; j = 1,…,95
Though the MEPE index allows weighting, in this case study application it was
computed with equal weights for each environmental practice. Five categories had
been established to classify the environmental performance supplied by the index, on
a scale of 0 to 1 (very poor: 0 – 0.20; poor: 0.21 – 0.40; medium: 0.41 – 0.60; good:
0.61 – 0.80; very good: 0.81 – 1.0). It should be stressed that the MEPE index was
not designed to evaluate the individual performance of each municipality, i.e. this
evaluation does not rank the respondent municipalities, and the analysis was
conducted for the entire Portuguese local administration sector. The analyses for this