University of Vaasa - Vaasan yliopisto

usiness and NGOs was cleared, companies started to seriously recognise the
environmental responsibility. This caused in Japan a rush of establishment of NGOs.
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Another big impact for CSR was a competition toward ISO 14001 and EMAS. ISO
14001 was issued in 1994. Along with establishment of ISO 14001, many
international or regional standards on environmental management system and
reporting system were also started. Most of environmental management system
standards require disclosure of environmental information of companies. To be
certified or registered by these standards a company has to make and improve an
information disclosure system especially that about environmental impacts. NGOs
could get information about a target company with much less costs than before.
Japanese and German companies were at first motivated to disclose information
through improvement of their environmental management system, however this was
crucial for CSR development.
Development of Information Technology (IT) drastically abated the transaction costs
for the NGOs, especially cost of information acquisition and distribution. This
enabled stakeholder to collect and distribute information about companies with
significantly less costs. For example, what you need to get information about a
company is to buy a computer and set up an internet connection. This was not
imaginable in 1970s.
Voluntary Agreement
In 1996 the Commission of the European Communities issued the Communication to
the Council and the European Parliament on Environmental Agreements
(COM(96)561 final, para.4 1996). The Commission argued that a voluntary
agreement (VA) will be an important measure for the European environmental policy
thanks to its cost efficiency. After that Germany became one of the countries who
use VA in a favour. Germany has the second largest number of VA implementation
with 93 VAs, following the Netherland. The declaration for Climate Protection
started in 1994 with unilateral promotion by the BDI was revised and re-started in
2000 as a negotiated agreement. In Japan Keidanren started an initiative called
“Global Environmental Charter” and “Voluntary Action Plan”. In the framework of
this initiative Keidanren suggested participants to collect and disclose information
about environmental impacts. Keidanren evaluates and publishes the evaluation
every year (Jisyu Kyotei Kentokai 2001).
What is the role of a VA? The problem which the German government had was that
the regulatory threat misled companies to hide information. A VA provides the room
in which the regulatory threat can function and make information costs lower. It is
true that a VA must be well designed in order to decrease the information costs for
governments. But many scholars often emphasise the information distribution of a
VA (Alberini and Segerson 2002). If the relationship of companies and government
is independent, this role of VAs should not be ignored.