Person:

Nash, Jennifer

Engaged scholarship brings universities and external partners together to create knowledge for mutual benefit. Together, faculty, students, and external partners define problems, undertake analysis, and share findings. A defining characteristic of engaged scholarship is reciprocity—participants share benefits as well as costs. This paper explores engaged scholarship as a growing part of the HKS curriculum. More students are calling for engaged scholarship opportunities. More faculty are offering engaged scholarship courses. The school is developing resources to help faculty assume new, more externally focused roles. To date, however, relatively little attention has been given to how the school’s growing interest in engaged scholarship is impacting external partners: mayors, department managers, city council members, and school district superintendents. What does engaged scholarship require of them in terms of time and resources? From their perspective, what are the costs and what are the benefits? How might HKS better take their interests into account?

Over the past decade, the U.S. EPA and states have developed Environmental Leadership Programs (ELPs) to recognize and encourage facilities with strong environmental performance.

ELPs offer benefits, including recognition and limited regulatory flexibility, to facilities that demonstrate that they comply with environmental regulations, set environmental performance goals that go beyond compliance, and report to agencies about their progress in meeting those goals. This article provides a descriptive account of the 18 most longstanding ELPs. We find that in addition to improving environmental quality, agencies seek to use these programs to achieve social goals such as reducing costs, improving relationships, and changing culture at facilities and agencies. Agencies collect significant amounts of information from participants about their activities under the auspices of these programs, but generally this information is not useful for program evaluation purposes. Data typically lack aggregational and inferential value: they do not share critical features that would allow them to be added up across all members and used in empirical analysis to assess program efficacy. Data weaknesses are significant, if not even surprising, given the aspirations for ELPs to facilitate policy learning and the claims that ELPs are delivering important benefits. This article charts the course for the kind of data collection and analysis that will needed to understand whether ELPs contribute to the goals agencies have set for them.

Voluntary environmental clubs run by governmental organizations have the potential to offer significant rewards to the businesses that join beyond brand image enhancement. Chief among these potential rewards is relief from otherwise onerous environmental regulations. In this paper we show that governmental voluntary programs offering the most significant regulatory benefits tend also, paradoxically, to have the fewest members. We explain this puzzling finding by focusing on (a) how the design of these programs corresponds with the rewards they offer members and (b) how membership levels in these clubs correspond with their design. While government agencies in theory have the most to offer facilities that participate in the voluntary programs they operate, in practice these agencies face a political environment that leads them to combine greater rewards with more demanding membership requirements. As it turns out, the rewards government offers are generally not significant enough to overcome the additional demands agencies seem to need to place on any potential members seeking these rewards. We conclude that, given the political dynamic surrounding the design of government clubs, the level of participation in government programs that offer substantial rewards beyond image enhancement can be predicted to remain relatively low.

Over the past decade, the U.S. EPA and some 20 states have developed Performance-Based Environmental Programs (PBEPs) that offer recognition and limited regulatory flexibility to facilities that comply with environmental regulations and set environmental performance goals that go beyond compliance. In addition to improving environmental quality, agencies seek to use these programs to achieve social goals such as reducing costs, improving relationships, and changing culture at facilities and agencies. In this paper we explore approaches for measuring the social impacts of these programs, a task which has received relatively little attention from agencies or scholars. An initial hurdle for those wishing to understand the impact of PBEPs is to develop appropriate social performance measures. A second hurdle is to determine whether changes in social performance are the result of the program or some other factor. We offer a variety of techniques for identifying a PBEP's social impacts, all of which require gathering data from "control groups" of facilities or other actors that are not involved in these programs.

Some of the most powerful techniques require evaluators to collect data from before participants joined the program. In order to utilize such techniques, agencies should take evaluation issues into account when they establish new PBEPs and collect pre-program data to compare to post-program outcomes or responses.

Voluntary programs intended to improve corporate environmental practices have proliferated in recent years. Why some businesses choose to participate in such voluntary programs, while others do not, remains an open question. Recent work suggests that companies' environmental practices, including their decisions to participate in a voluntary program, are shaped by a license to operate comprised of social, regulatory, and economic pressures. Although these external factors do matter, by themselves they only partially explain business decision making, since facilities subject to similar external factors often behave differently. In this paper, we draw from organizational theory to explain why we would expect a company's license to operate to be ultimately constructed by internal factors, such as managerial incentives, organizational culture, and organizational identity, as these factors shape both interpretations of the external pressures and organizational responses to them. Using qualitative data from an exploratory study of matched facilities that reached different decisions about participating in a prominent voluntary environmental program, we then report evidence indicative of the role of these internal factors in shaping facilities' environmental decisions. Finally, we offer suggestions for future research that could further develop understanding of how internal organizational characteristics influence environmental management decisions, including those concerning participation in voluntary programs.