Greening the Production and Supply Chains in Asia: Is there a Role for Voluntary Initiatives?

KRC-2005-No.6E
ディスカッションペーパー
Greening the Production and Supply Chains in Asia: Is there a Role for Voluntary Initiatives?

In Asia, private sector has been the engine of much of recent economic growth, while its regional growth has kept the entire world growing. However, this expansion also came with a cost of environmental sustainability that starts shaking the development process itself. Increasing awareness and growing public concerns about the negative environmental impacts has prompted the Asian business and governments to reconsider their strategy for economic development and promote green production and consumption patterns through such approaches as voluntary initiatives. Broadly speaking voluntary initiatives is the process of encompassing a wide range of measures that aim to improve the environmental performance of business. They tend to go beyond existing laws and legislation related to environmental and social protection but may also act as an alternative to legislation. They may be unilaterally developed by companies and industry or designed and implemented by various stakeholders including multilateral institutions, governments, trade unions and non-governmental organizations. This paper aims at describing the overall situation with regard to voluntary initiatives in the Asia, and at analyzing the comparative implementation in different economies of the Region, at identifying the major trends such as the formation of powerful alliance of corporate business, local community and market forces for mutual recognition. Cross-cutting lessons from Asia in adopting voluntary initiatives lead to the conclusion that they undoubtedly represent key strategic components of business competitiveness and sustainability in production and supply chains. In other words, they have the potential to become an important tool to integrate economy, trade and environment. However, no existing scheme is fully appropriate to specific sectors like agriculture, manufacturing, services etc. More research is needed on these aspects as well as strategies to build certification systems and standards that can accommodate regional economies of different scale. Nevertheless, this study lead into overall understanding of the potentials of voluntary initiatives, basically aimed at providing orientation to corporate business and policy makers regarding the implementation of these initiatives and the important aspects to pay attention to.

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