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.