Desenvolvimento turístico sustentávelavaliação do comportamento ambiental dos hotéis algarvios e análise estrutural da influência dos stakeholders

Resumo

The quest for a sustainable society has become, over the past decades, a major concern of the international community. Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, the rise of social and environmental problems triggered, on a global scale, an active search for a new model of development that could reconcile economic, social and environmental aspects. This new paradigm, known as sustainable development, was introduced at the beginning of the 1970s and it also comprised the concern for the preservation of resources for the future generations. Corporations, the basic units of any economic organization, play a crucial role in addressing the challenges posed by the paradigm of sustainability, from which a set of influences and practices stems, such as Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and Corporate Environmental Responsibility (CER), in order to achieve a socially and environmentally responsible performance. In this context, the corporations’ environmental responsibility is materialized in their environmental behavior, which in turn reflects the corporations’ environmental management strategies. Therefore, through the analysis of these strategies, it’s possible to evaluate the corporations’ environmental behavior which, according to Boiral (2006), is a way to assess their contribution to a sustainable development. As the Algarve is the most popular tourist region in Portugal, being tourism its main economic activity, this research focuses on the environmental management strategies of the hotel industry in this region, in order to characterize the hotels’ environmental behaviour and assess their contribution to the sustainable development of the Algarve region. In this sense, the empirical analysis focuses on the environmental procedures implemented by the hotel units in the Algarve, in order to identify different strategic positions and to define a taxonomy of environmental strategies, which are then characterized in terms of a set of specific variables suggested in the literature on the subject. Among these variables, special attention is paid to the pressure exerted by the stakeholders which consists, according to Sharma and Starik (2004), in one of the main driving forces behind the development of proactive environmental management strategies. The empirical analysis proceeds in two stages. In the first, the goal is to identify and characterize the environmental management strategies implemented by hotel units in the Algarve. To do this, we performed a Principal Component Analysis and a Cluster Analysis, as well as various statistical tests (t, X2, Kruskall-Wallis, LSD, Anova, Scheffé). The second stage aims to analyze the stakeholders’ influence on these environmental strategies through the application of a structural equation model (SEM), using the method of Partial Least Squares (PLS).