A systematic literature review on firm-level proactive environmental management

There is a broad spectrum of proactivity in environmental management practices in companies and industries, ranging from purely reactive efforts to adhere to minimum regulatory standards to innovative projects to develop new pollution preventing technologies and risk mitigation strategies. In fact, the importance of a proactive environmental management is increasingly recognized by academics, practitioners and policy makers alike. However, proactivity is still not clearly captured by current environmental management models, which often do not include it as a core element and lack practical guidelines on how to operationalize it at firm-level. In order to systematize the fragmented understanding on proactive environmental management practices applied in companies and industries, including their operationalization and determinants, we conducted a comprehensive review of 116 academic papers. Our results are presented and discussed along three main perspectives: (i) evolutionary stage models; (ii) typology models; and (iii) proactive practices. By comparing these three perspectives, we found that only the evolutionary stage models can fully capture proactive environmental management approaches in an integrative way, while the other two perspectives assume proactivity is highly specific of an organizational sector or function. The results also allow us to clarify and distinguish proactivity-related terms and concepts that are often used interchangeably, such as cleaner production, pollution prevention and eco-efficiency. Finally, we developed a synthetizing framework of the current literature on firm-level environmental proactivity that integrates proactive practices (divided into three dimensions: organizational, operational, and communicational), drivers of proactivity and evolutionary maturity stages towards increased proactivity. This framework not only consolidates the current state-of-the-art in terms of proactive environmental management practices but it can also be thought of as a starting point for further research on the topic.