Sustainable development: integrating environmental issues into strategic planning

As we begin the twenty-first century it appears that for a growing number of industries environmental issues are emerging with increasing frequency as strategic problems. If human economic activity is to be sustainable, then strategic behaviour of companies must take account of the structural elements. Researchers in the western societies are trying to understand how the companies integrate the sustainability issues into their strategies. No such study has been reported on companies operating in the ASEAN countries. This paper reports the findings of a case study research on this issue which was conducted on seven global companies operating in Singapore. Two frameworks were applied to analyse the nature and extent of integration of environmental management practices into the organizational strategic planning process. The study reveals that the majority of the sample companies have well-developed environmental management systems in place which satisfies the requirements of the strategic planning criterion of the (Singapore) business excellence framework. These companies are also found to be actively engaged in at least four of the five best practices of environmental leadership framework suggested by Dechant and Altman.