Creating public: private partnerships with Environmental Management Systems (EMS) – encouraging participation and progress
NSW Department of Primary Industries, Wollongbar Agricultural Institute 1243 Bruxner Highway, Wollongbar NSW 2477
The use of EMS in a range of industry and government sectors continues to grow around the world. Increasingly, these systems are being relied on both by government agencies and business operators to achieve triple-bottom line outcomes. During visits to a range of EMS users in the US in 2007, key features that assisted in creating public: private partnerships and forging successful environmental outcomes were apparent. These features included:
This paper describes several of the partnership approaches and highlights some of the features of these programs that ‘make it work’. These findings are compared with approaches to EMS that have recently been used in Australia.
Key Words
Environmental management systems, ISO 14001, Green Tier, partnership for environmental outcomes