Should monitoring be compulsory within voluntary environmental agreements?

The emerging concept of business accountability implies a duty to demonstrate responsibility to stakeholders. Signing a voluntary environmental agreement is a method of pledging commitment; however, few voluntary environmental agreements contain monitoring mechanisms to demonstrate performance against that commitment. Some voluntary environmental agreements in the industry and business sector incorporate monitoring mechanisms and these are examined in order to discover lessons that can be learned. A monitoring mechanism, such as Environmental Reporting via hardcopy and the World Wide Web provides a useful and flexible mechanism that could be utilized to a much greater extent within other sectors. Higher education sector agreements such as the European COPERNICUS Charter and the global Talloires Declaration in particular are assessed using survey evidence to demonstrate the need for additional stimuli to ensure commitment. Flexible and incremental monitoring and reporting via a variety of cost effective communication media could provide the way forward in terms of establishing both credibility and sustainability of the voluntary environmental agreement mechanism. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment