Strategic moves of leading Spanish utilities on their path to sustainabilitycorporate behaviour, environmental initiatives and capabilities development

Resumen

TITULO: strategic moves OF leading Spanish utilities ON their path to sustainability: corporate behaviour, environmental initiatives and capabilities development resumen: Since the publication of the World Commission on Environment and Development Report in 1987, which coined the term "sustainable development" (SD), management of environmental concerns was raised to a strategic issue for the Corporation. There has been a growing stream of literature dealing with SD at the corporate level. Christmann and Taylor (2002) looked at different voluntary environmental initiatives and proposed a typology of corporate behaviour to deal with environmental issues. Their approach is not dynamic and doesn¿t address how the corporate behaviour evolves as an initiative develops. First i aim at understanding the evolution overtime of a firm¿s behaviour to deal with SD issues and the influence of its past environmental experience. I argue that the environmental experience prior a firrrfs commitment to SD conditions choice of its SD corporate behaviour. Second i am interested in shedding light on which factor has a greater importance in the development process of SD initiatives. Finally, several authors argue that the development of specific capabilities is key to deal with SD. Most of these studies concentrate on the actual development of capabilities at the corporate level. I aim to look at the capabilities development at the level of the SD initiative to get more insight in the black box of specific SD capabilities development. m order to address my research goals, i introduce a research framework, the path to sustainability composed by various constructs. As recommended by Yin (1989), I use the case study method since the phenomenon observed is highly contextual. I select the utility sector for its environmental sensitiveness and Spain for being one of the first liberalized utility markets in Europe. I analyse the three leading Spanish companies, all committed to SD. This longitudinal study starts at the SD commitment year corresponding to the publication of the first sustainability report, until the end od 2004. i find that over time, all companies aim at becoming proactive to deal with SD issues. Each company has a specific path to SD pro-activeness which depends on its respective administrative heritage, initial SD corporate behaviour, SD initiatives and evolution of the SD capabilities and SD strategic importance. The Development mode, which ranges on a continuum from external standard adoption to internan y emergent, and the relative importance of the influencing factors play a key role in the development process of the SD initiatives. This research contributes to the corporate sustainable development and the dynamic capabilities fields. it confirms that specific SD capabilities are needed to address SD and shed light on the influence of legislation, economic opportunities, stakeholder pressures and ethical motives on the SD capabilities developed. in terms of managerial implications the typology is helpful for companies looking for possible paths to greater sustainability considering their SD profile characteristics