There is a powerful tendency among environmental managers, and the academic institutions that train them, to insist that environmental management is increasingly strategic. In fact, most environmental management is, and should be, profoundly tactical. This does not mean operational environmental management is unimportant: making sure that firms comply with regulatory requirements is a constant effort. Legal compliance, especially in areas where society has deliberately reduced the boundary between civil and criminal penalties, is no trivial matter. New technologies and processes require new management techniques.

But environmental management is at best an overhead function, relatively independent of the strategic missions of the firm. And most efforts to conflate environmental management with strategy confuse “important” with “strategic.” Environmental management is important. It is not, in most cases, strategic.

Take, for example, environmental management systems, or EMSs. Are they important? Yes, in that they can help a firm perform its environmental (and frequently safety) functions in ways that are efficient and more likely to support compliance and avoid inadvertent violations. EMSs are an important operational tool, and any reasonably sized firm that does not have one is being mismanaged.

But that does not mean EMSs are “strategic”: the very fact that they focus on environmental performance demonstrates that they are not. It is almost oxymoronic: a truly strategic environmental management system would not focus on environmental issues at all. The idea of “strategic environmental management” may appeal to consultants, and to environmental managers who somehow think a “strategic” position is preferable to a critical operational one, but it is close to a null set in practice for most firms.

That does not mean that there aren’t strategic issues that have environmental dimensions. For many sectors, from information technology to biotechnology to extractive industries, operations are increasingly challenged by a broadening range of stakeholders. Issues that previously resided with political entities are increasingly in play as global governance structures shift. Examples might include disagreements about genetic engineering or human rights standards in developing countries; where these once would be resolved by national governments, they are now debated by firms and nongovernmental organizations, and resolution may not involve governments at all. Such broad corporate social responsibility issues may well be critical to the firm, even leading to questions about its right to exist, at least among activists.

Another example is the transition of the firm from a facilities-based to a netcentric structure by, for example, replacing reams of paper and white-collar offices with network infrastructures and functionality shifted to the Internet and e-business solutions. New work practices appropriate to a knowledge economy, rather than a manufacturing economy, would include telework, virtual office packages, and knowledge performance assessment metrics. Clearly, this evolution has environmental and social benefits — for example, significantly reducing paper consumption and unnecessary travel. Just as clearly, it is a challenge to the very definition of the firm, and its implementation thus involves organizations from operational units, to HR, to the information technology function, to corporate security. It is strategic in every sense of the word.

These all have an environmental dimension, but are far more complex than that. Evaluating their impacts on the firm, employees, stakeholders, and cultures within which the firm operates requires integrating knowledge from many different kinds of sources. Environmental input may be relevant, but even then it will usually not be compliance and remediation knowledge but broader management expertise that is key. For the student, the point is not that environmental knowledge and sensitivity isn’t important. But if you want to participate in the strategic decision-making of firms, don’t train or job search to end up in an environmental slot. “Important” is not “strategic.”

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Brad Allenby is vice president of environment, health, and safety for AT&T, an adjunct professor at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, the University of Virginia’s Engineering School, and Princeton Theological Seminary, and Batten Fellow at the University of Virginia’s Darden Business School. The views expressed herein are those of the author, and not any institution with which he is associated.