Attitudes towards environmental responsibility within Australia and India: a comparative study

Abstract

Efforts to promote corporate environmental responsibility (CER) require an understanding of stakeholder attitudes towards enhanced accountability. However, little is known about current attitudes on this subject. This study presents a survey of the attitudes of corporate managers across Australia and India towards 16 key contemporary environmental responsibility issues. The study sought to explore whether respondents from these countries, characterised by differing levels of development, differ in their attitudes towards environmental responsibility (ER). The findings indicate that Indian respondents were stronger in their support, and identified a select few issues to be more important over other environmental factors. Although Australian respondents moderately supported most of the environmental issues, they were not prominent in supporting most environmental issues under question. Results indicated overall positive attitudes towards ER by both the groups of respondents. Significant differences did exist between the 318 respondents on 8 of the 16 questions. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) confirmed three distinct environmental factors for Australian respondents and four environmental factors for Indian respondents.

Keywords:

• attitude
• ER (environmental responsibility)
• Australian
• Indian

Acknowledgements

The paper was presented at both the 34th annual congress of European Accounting Association and 2nd International Finance Conference 2011. The authors are grateful to the participants of both conferences and anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions on an earlier version of the paper.

Notes

1. The Indian economy grew by 6.7% in 2008–2009 and 7.2% in 2009–2010 (www.finmin.nic.in). India is the fourth largest economy in terms of purchasing power parity, tenth most industrialised economy and has the third largest pool of scientific and technical manpower when ranked against the world's economies.

2. The Australian economy grew by 1.4% in 2009 and 2.5% in 2010.

3. A widely used measure of pro-environmental orientation was developed by Dunlap and Van Liere (1978).