ABSTRACT
The development of formal environmental management systems including environmental audit, has been modest in both the private and public sectors in Great Britain up to the end of the 1980s. Glasson, Therivel and Chadwick (1994) list a wide variety of reasons why a private sector company may undertake an environmental audit (p.292) and assert that few of the findings appear in the public arena because of the wish to protect commercially sensitive information. In general, the adoption of an environmental management system (EMS) derives from the development of "upstream" approaches to environmental management, which are no longer concerned with "end of pipe" solutions. "Management systems aim to pull a potentially disparate system into an integrated and organised one. To that end the system covers not only management's responsibilities but the responsibility and tasks of every individual in an organisation" (Welford and Gouldson, 1993, p.73). The EMS approach is based on earlier quality systems approaches and on the idea of continuous improvement.
