Strategic alliances for environmental protection

Existing scholarship regarding strategic alliances has been limited by the tendency to view alliance formation through a single theoretical lens and to focus solely on the economic aspects (e.g., acquisition of capabilities) of narrowly defined relationships. As yet, there has been little attention paid toward examining how strategic alliances-of all sorts-can address social, economic and environmental issues. This chapter addresses these concerns by integrating the resource-based view of the firm with institutional theory to assess firms' decisions to participate in a strategic alliance. Drawing on these motivations, this chapter articulates a framework to characterize strategic alliances based on their competency-and legitimacy-orientation. A conceptual model is then constructed to examine the extent to which these strategic alliances are likely to encourage firms to adopt more (or less) proactive environmental strategies.