The three "E" = efficiency, effectiveness and equity

From: Winsemius, P. & Guntram, U 1992, 'Responding to the environmental challenge', Business Horizons, vol. 35, no. 2, pp. pp. 12-20.

These three "e" concepts are not so new after all. I traced it back to a paper by Winsemius & Guntram (1992) that say exactly below:

"... Faced with such increasing pressures, many companies have taken positive initiatives. However, new thinking is still needed for society to develop solutions that simultaneously satisfy three criteria: effectiveness (contributing to improving the environment); efficiency (improving the environment at the minimum cost); and equity (showing fairness in the burden sharing among players). To achieve these three criteria, the divisions that currently separate the players in the environmental policy-making arena must be bridged." (p. 12)

 

These have been reintroduced under the label eco-efficiency, eco-equity and eco-effectiveness by other authors. This is from my proposal:

Malhotra et al (2010) posit that the benefits of technological use in the pursuit of eco-sustainability can be framed using the three eco-sustainability goals: eco-efficiency (DeSimone & Popoff, 1997), eco-equity (Gray & Bebbington, 2000) and eco-effectiveness (McDonough & Braungart, 1998).  

 

  1. Eco-efficiency refers to a businesses’ ability to deliver “competitively priced goods and services that satisfy human needs and bring quality of life while progressively reducing ecological impacts” (DeSimone & Popoff, 1997; 47).
  2. Eco-equity focuses on the equal rights of people to environmental resources and a business’s ‘social responsibility’ for the future generations (Gray & Bebbington, 2000).
  3. Meanwhile, the general idea of eco-effectiveness is to stop contamination and depletion by directing individual and organizational attention to the underlying and fundamental factors of environmental problems through a fundamental redesign of the system (McDonough & Braungart, 1998).

In brief, eco-equity goal tries to capture the equity between peoples and generations; eco-efficiency captures the notion of reducing (e.g material and energy inputs per unit of output) and eco-effectiveness captures the idea of overall ecological footprints (Gray & Bebbington, 2000). Therefore, it is argued that the use of “Green IS” in organisations should be able to bring quantifiable benefits for achieving the three eco-sustainability goals