Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Companies in most newly industrialized nations have embraced sustainability and environmental protection as part of their international competitive strategies. The trend toward proactive environmental management has been also grown in South Korea, in large part due to green economy policies that were promoted by the Lee Administration (2008-2013) (Yun et al., 2011). Consumers, investors, and local policy networks have also provided fresh impetus for the greening of South Korean firms (Kim, 2011, CDP, 2015). However, unlike the heightened interests in firms’ environmentally responsible behavior, there is no systematic analysis of Korean firms’ environmental strategies. This study analyzes large Korean firms’ disclosed CSR or sustainability reports to answer the questions of how firms help advance green economy and which types of sustainable practices have been adopted by Korean firms. The study finds that firms are more likely to adopt lower-order sustainability practices such as pollution control as compared to higher-order sustainability practices and clean technologies. The factors driving firms' greenness are mostly associated with legitimate concerns, which may invite firms' perfunctory green actions that are not aligned with fundamental changes in process- and product-related environmental management and thus may induce a collective action dilemma. This study implies that the concept of "green economy” remains a vexed question to the broad business community in South Korea despite the strong emphasis on green jobs and markets as a critical policy agenda item.