ABSTRACT
The task of regulating large enterprises is very different from that of controlling the behaviour of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Most such enterprises, unlike SMEs, are sophisticated in their general (and increasingly in their environmental) management, and have substantial units devoted to legal and environmental issues. Large enterprises are elephants rather than foxes: they are big, readily identifiable and easy to target. Public voluntary approaches have been defined as programmes devised by an environmental agency in which individual enterprises are invited to participate. In their most common form, the regulatory agency pre-sets a target and invites individual enterprises to commit to it. Enterprises with widely differing levels of environmental performance, even within the same industry sector, may all establish an environmental management system (EMS) that complies with ISO 14001. An increasing number of enterprises are also choosing to have their reports externally verified, thereby providing a credibility with external stakeholders that is otherwise lacking.
