Attitudinal Measures for Socio-environmental Governance in Public Organisations of the Amazon Region

Concept of Socio-environmental Management, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and Public Service

Socio-environmental management gains prominence when society imposes accountability measures or in the face of a possible scarcity of natural resources resulting from changes caused by human actions. Da Silva and De Azevedo Almeida (2019) show that economic development must be accompanied by issues related to well-being and social justice, balancing the distribution of resources, reducing inequalities and preserving the environment. In addition, the authors propose three pillars for sustainability, namely social relevance, ecological prudence and economic viability.

Rek and Marini (2019) state that environmental management methodologies are made up of instruments aimed at instituting socio-environmental practices in public and private organisations, and through these methodologies, actions, projects, programmes and public policies are put into operation with the aim of raising awareness among stakeholders, reducing environmental degradation, reducing negative environmental impacts and improving the quality of life in the environment. These authors present the phases that make up environmental management, beginning with the identification of the values involved in conflicts and the establishment of public policies, promoting the institutionalisation of the management system and the economic–financial, legal and technical instruments that make up sustainable environmental management. They recommend the need to adopt strategic positions, such as drawing up an environmental policy, planning, environmental management and monitoring.

It is important to consider CSR in order to highlight new ways of managing a system beyond the mere organisation of production factors, considering ethical actions in relation to the social and environmental impacts generated. Public and private organisations need to express this responsibility transparently by developing acts and attitudes aimed at minimising the negative social and environmental impacts that their actions may cause. We would just like to highlight the interdisciplinary nature of the concept of socio-environmental responsibility, as it is a systemic approach focused on relations with all the parties directly or indirectly interested in the company’s business, interested in ethical development and social well-being (Ávila et al., 2023).

Public service, from a broad perspective, involves all types of state provision, from essential state activities to economic activities carried out by a government structure. For Cezne (2005), the concept of public service refers to any activity carried out by the state or by anyone who exercises administrative functions of a public nature, in this case by means of legal permission to do so. In addition, these activities must be carried out under the aegis of the law or regulatory standard. Philippi et al. (2017) indicate the knowledge chain model, combining knowledge management with the so-called secondary activities in organisations, such as those consisting of leadership, coordination, control and measurement, in order to carry out activities for the acquisition, selection, generation, internalisation and externalisation of knowledge resulting from the interactions of internal processes. This idealised conception, based on reading the aforementioned authors, allows us to infer that secondary activities in the public service can encourage attitudes towards socio-environmental decisions, suggesting the manifestation of creativity, flexibility and innovation.

Conceptualising Strategic Planning and Strategic Management (SWOT) Analysis, Institution and Institutionalisation

According to De Mendonça Santos and Macêdo (2023), SWOT analysis is a theoretical method for assessing the work environment from the perspective of internal environments (strengths and weaknesses) and external environments (opportunities and threats). Strengths are internal conditions capable of aiding proper organisational performance and weaknesses are difficulties that hinder proper organisational performance. Opportunities are, in turn, external conditions that can favour the achievement of objectives that are not controllable by the organisation, and threats are external conditions that can hinder business progress. Mirales et al. (2019) point out that the purpose of this method is to help organisations position themselves strategically in the environment in which they operate, to make assertive decisions, highlighting the collection of information to base the strategic formation process, directing the organisation towards the development of sustainable competitive advantages.

The roots of neo-institutionalism lie in institutionalism. Both approach rationality-based models of organisation with scepticism, considering institutionalisation to be a process that depends on the actions of the state, making organisations instrumentally less rational. The following two concepts are fundamental to the new institutionalism: institutions and institutionalisation. According to Braga (2020), institutions are not just restrictive structures, that is, they all authorise and control at the same time, and can be characterised as socially constructed and routinely reproduced programmes or systems of government that function as relative elements of restrictive environments, accompanied by explanations that are taken for granted. On the other hand, institutionalisation can be represented as a particular set of social reproductive processes. In general terms, Braga (2020) concludes by saying that while the institution represents a social order or pattern that has achieved a certain state or property, institutionalisation indicates the process for achieving it. In this sense, he adds that it would be up to the organisation to consider the influences of the environment on its decisions and actions. Institutional theorists have contributed to the study of organisations by reconceptualising organisational environments. Considering the new institutionalism approach, the environment penetrates the organisation and creates a particular worldview for those agents in relation to the categories of structure, action and thought.

Concept of Technical and Regulatory Measures, Compliance and Accountability

Social and environmental management in government organisations involves regulatory measures. Reading Rek and Marini (2019), it can be predicted that adequately structured public policies are essential for socio-environmental management, through which strategic actions can be promoted, as well as investments that will support organisational performance through the expected quality of results. Some examples of predictable expectations emerge from this literature, such as the preservation of the environment, biodiversity conservation, sustainable development and poverty eradication, all of which are very well aligned with the sustainable development goals set out by the United Nations; these are arguments that could only be brought to fruition through properly regulated legislation. These authors argue that public policies involving socio-environmental management should be operationalised through municipal, state and federal legal norms as enforcement mechanisms, which become reasonable definitions for the materialisation of the effects of standardised operationalisation. In relation to technical measures, Braga (2020) enters this context when he discusses technical environments as control models in organisations in the quest to improve efficiency, and it is essential to identify, from the point of view of technical environments, whether public institutions are able to show solidity when incorporating new experiences into their organisational routines.

Technical measures bring us back to organisational competencies. As a set of instruments based on ethics and integrity, compliance guides managers in decision-making processes and requires monitoring to check that the regulatory criteria are being met (Rocha Pereira & Pedro Filho, 2023). This conceptual expectation is echoed by Serotini (2023), who defines compliance as a means of complying with laws, guidelines and internal and external regulations in the quest to mitigate risks, whether of a regulatory, legal or reputational nature, from the point of view of ethical control by those responsible for management practices. Based on Serotini’s (2023) notes, it is possible to assume that, even though organisations need to operate under the compliance framework, with socio-environmental sustainability regulations, it is possible to see occurrences that are harmful to the environment and, in this way, denounce the lack of investment in preventive methods by organisations and their supervisory or punitive processes on the part of the controlling power.

In institutional environments, control measures lack legitimacy with society, as a condition of accountability resulting from technical pressures to be judged by tax-paying citizens. As Da Silva & De São Pedro Filho (2021) rightly point out, accountability offers democratic development through appropriate actions to control and monitor indicators aimed at measuring results in public management, technical measures that guide the convergence of actions with standards and also guide the behaviour of the manager.

Content Analysis Method

As for the method, we used the content analysis method developed by Bardin (1977), using three stages, namely pre-analysis, exploration of the material, categorisation or coding and treatment of the results, inferences and interpretation. In the first stage, the material to be used in the analysis is organised, with the aim of operationalising and systematising ideas, as well as formulating objectives and hypotheses and drawing up an analysis plan. The second stage is characterised by coding, classification and categorisation according to the defined rules. In the last phase, the analyst reflects on the research material and the results obtained, taking into account the various possibilities for analysing the research material.

The Procedures Adopted

The data collection procedure involved a bibliographic and documentary survey. Bibliographic research was carried out using scientific articles, journals, theses and books on the subject, preferably published in recent years. It was decided to carry out an investigation based on publications available in databases on public access platforms, such as Scientific Periodicals Electronic Library of National Association of Postgraduate and Research in Administration (Spell Anad), Google Scholar, Scopus and Web of Science, using keywords combined by Boolean methods. Documentary searches were carried out, collecting standards and legislation on the subject; technical consultations were adopted, focusing on themes similar to socio-environmental management in public institutions. Criticism about the relevance to the object of study was accepted, and for this purpose, qualified and up-to-date works were collected; full reading of these selected contributions went through the cleavage of those excerpts aligned with the subject; categorisation was then carried out, bringing together related ideas, which were structured in the form of topics, in line with what is proposed in this document.

Characterisation of Actions to be Implemented in an Organisation

In this compartment, the study offers the prospect of guaranteeing managerial compatibility of a socio-environmental nature to be developed in an organisation committed to the relationship. These are measures that can enable participatory and collaborative management.

Participative management, as shown in Table 1, is a management model aimed at aligning strategies, from their implementation to the evaluation of the practical effects resulting from this process. The procedures resulting from alignment are good at characterising the form, conduct and valid guidelines and can lead to indications of innovation, which is common in organisations undergoing the necessary adaptability. In today’s society, the processes are the result of establishing a democratic relationship between the leader and those being led, with proactivity and the capacity for dialogue being valued as goals for consensus; this avoids conflicts of interest, friction of ideas and brings about the conformity designed by the parties involved.

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Table 1.

Breakdown of Leadership Attitudes for Developing Participatory Management Models.

Attitudes to Participatory Management	Description
1. Establishing democratic relationships	Establishing a new relationship between employers and employees, in which the employee’s proactivity and the employer’s ability to listen and seek consensus are valued.
2. Encourage initiative and proactivity	Renounce models of the boss as the sole holder of knowledge and evoke the creative capacity of employees and also collectivism.
3. Establish compliance based on open dialogue	Adopt a decentralised management system, with a participatory work environment and employees who must provide information before being charged, making them co-responsible for the company’s results.

As shown in Table 2, collaborative management indicates a management model that identifies the organisation as an intelligent whole that seeks self-development, with the aim of connecting employees to each other and the environment. In view of this, it is proposed to consolidate a flow of learning process in the relationships between the people and organisations involved, generating enough knowledge to create solutions, respecting the complexity of current systems, in the format explained in Philippi et al. (2017).

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Table 2.

Discrimination of Leadership Attitudes for the Development of Collaborative Management Models.

Attitudes to Collaborative Management	Description
1. Integrated self-development of the system	Truly exchanging data and information in order to promote constructive dialogue on diverse topics and systematically seek understandings for useful results.
2. Connecting individuals with each other and with the environment	Promote an organisational culture to raise the level of awareness of those involved, gain the trust of stakeholders based on open communication and thus create new competencies.
3. Helping others by generating complex knowledge	Helping colleagues in their individual learning process so that everyone can do what they already know better and better and is open to learning what they do not yet know.

Collaboration therefore means working together to help develop each other and, consequently, institutional competencies. However, participatory management is not opposed to collaborative management. On the contrary, collaborative and participative management models complement each other in that collaborative management includes the perspective of participation, including the need to help others make decisions based on new knowledge generated, as shown in Figure 1, which shows applicability from an angular view of leadership.

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Employment Participatory and Collaborative Management in Socio-environmental Management.

This highlights the importance of the knowledge-building processes advocated by Philippi et al. (2017), which use information flow management to increase organisational competencies and improve relationships. In this process of building knowledge, we have the example of the methodology for building the 8C environment—knowledge, trust, sharing, awareness, collaboration, communication, culture and competence—which helps to eliminate individual defences and develop knowledge management techniques and innovation, promoting synergy and proactivity. This builds valuable internal social capital to generate sustainable development.

Conceptual Analysis of the Factors that Interfere with the Institutionalisation of the Role of the Socio-environmental Manager in the Organisation

The diagnosis of the environment in which organisations operate can be reshaped using SWOT analysis. In this way, managers in organisations can see the strengths and weaknesses of a given context, revealing opportunities and threats, as shown in Table 3.

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Table 3.

SWOT Analysis for Strategic Socio-environmental Management in Organisations.

Strategic Management
SWOT Analysis
Internal Environment		External Environment
Strengths	Weaknesses	Opportunities	Threats
Identify strengths that would help the organisation implement social and environmental management measures.	Identify weaknesses that would hinder the implementation of social and environmental management measures in the organisation and need to be addressed.	Identify opportunities in the external environment that would enhance institutional results and help organisations implement social and environmental management measures.	Identify threats in the external environment that would threaten the adequate continuity of the organisation’s business and hinder the implementation of socio-environmental management.

Institutional governance can then develop a commitment to the development, well-being and quality of life of all stakeholders, namely its employees, families and civil society. These beneficiaries of responsible socio-environmental management are positively impacted by its qualified management. In addition to the effects on the general environment, from where resources are collected or where waste is discharged, it is essential to find ways to reconcile the objectives, both institutional and individual, of the participants in the process.

In addition, a socially responsible company must obey the law, be profitable and ethical and exercise the role of corporate citizenship. These responsibilities can be represented by the following four perspectives: economic, legal, ethical and philanthropic; or by the perspective of the environmental, social, economic, stakeholder and voluntary dimensions, following the understanding of Philippi et al. (2017); or from an interdisciplinary perspective of the environmental, social and economic dimensions, known as the triple bottom line or three pillars of sustainability, also taking into account the active participation of all stakeholders, as discussed by Silvestre and Ţîrcă (2019) and Abad-Segura et al. (2019), as we consider in this work. The literature identifies some determining factors for the choice of social responsibility tools by organisations, as shown in Table 4.

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Table 4.

Breakdown of the Dimensions of Social and Environmental Responsibility That Should Be Involved in Implementing Management Measures.

Dimensions of Social and Environmental Responsibility	Description
1. Environmental	Organisations are responsible for minimising their impact on the environment, and this involves environmentally friendly policies and practices.
2. Social	Organisations are also responsible for promoting development while respecting social equity.
3. Economic	Organisations must generate positive results from their interactions, be they financial or non-financial.
4. Stakeholders	Organisations must involve all stakeholders in order to promote a synergistic contribution.

Source: Adapted from Silvestre and Ţîrcă (2019) and Abad-Segura et al. (2019).

This contextualisation in the breakdown mentioned above is significant in that it once again recalls the concept of SWOT analysis, as it guides the organisation so that its managers can protect themselves in the economic and social scenario; they can find a system, methodological, programmatic and activity tool, whose strategic implementation results in recognition of corporate social and environmental responsibility. It should be noted that the complexity and diversity of social and environmental responsibility issues sometimes require the use of various management tools in order to institutionalise the strategy assertively. According to Philippi et al. (2017), the assertiveness of the strategy involves the use of a tool architecture classified by a normative framework (what to do), a management system (how to integrate) and process guidelines (how to measure and communicate).

Proposal From Normative and Technical Creators

This subtopic of the task includes propositions considered credible through an operational configuration that can be institutionalised; it derives determining factors for the generation of a management tool capable of promoting adequate socio-environmental management, considering the organisational strategies well defined earlier in this study. Constructs adapted from the recommendations of Philippi et al. (2017) were developed. It should be noted that, although the authors propose ten factors, only five were used in this indicator, due to the logical pertinence dealt with in Table 5.

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Table 5.

Proposal for Determining Factors for Generating a Management Tool.

Determining Factors of Philippi et al. (2017)	Descriptive of the Propositions
1. Reputation of the organisation that developed the tool.	1.1 The institution in which the agent develops attitudinal measures should require them to have a command of socio-environmental relations.
	1.2 Organisations must have a social and environmental development vertex in their developed technologies.
	1.3 Located in the Amazon, the institutions must evaluate evidence and exploratory practices directly in the regional natural environment.
2. Assessment of whether the tool is consistent with the principles of social responsibility.	2.1 Transparency is an important mechanism for publicising institutional actions so that society can understand, monitor and contribute to them.
	2.2 Ethics is a key factor in a society and organisations made up of social agents can implement this awareness.
	2.3 Society must be called upon to participate by highlighting its local concerns and suggesting solutions, which presupposes education for this purpose.
3. Purpose for which the tool was developed, whether by type of organisation or area of interest.	3.1 To build a strategic methodology to aid decision-making and monitor the socio-environmental performance of organisations and citizens.
	3.2 Contribute to global sustainability by providing data and insights that enable organisations to make a positive contribution.
	3.3 Promote stakeholder engagement and actively involve them in order to promote socio-environmental measures and obtain relevant feedback.
4. Relevance of the tool in the region of application.	4.1 Understand regional singularities, carry out actions and implement government regulations in line with local demands.
	4.2 Respect biodiversity and the existence of local communities by publicising them and carrying out measures to enable their development.
	4.3 Make the world aware of the importance of preserving and conserving the natural environment in parallel with regional development.
5. Type of organisation that will use the tool.	5.1 Public or private organisations committed to social and environmental responsibility towards the assisted community.
	5.2 Community associations and their leaders interested in getting support from a committed body.
	5.3 Various institutions not identified above that in some way seek support for the compromised body from their managers.

Source: Adapted from Philippi et al. (2017).

The argument is based on the dynamic analysis of socio-spatial events in the Brazilian Amazon. It seeks to respect the individual who establishes relationships with the natural environment according to their knowledge and organisational, productive and available technology capabilities. According to Da Ponte and Szlafsztein (2022), this relationship has developed through interaction and the passage of time and signals the potential for humanisation of the Amazon region, designated as a complex mosaic of coupled human–natural systems.

There is an organisational structure highlighted by Philippi et al. (2017) focused on proposing the implementation of concrete socio-environmental actions from a public organisation, here situated as middle-up-down. From this perspective, knowledge creation is possible, focusing on the tactical level or middle management. However, it involves a relationship with top management and operational employees in the dynamics of internal behavioural implementation. In this way, a much more efficient creation process is expected than in the top-down or bottom-up models. This organisational structure can be complemented by a management model that deals with organisational knowledge called the knowledge chain. This management model aligns knowledge management processes with the organisation’s secondary activities, such as leadership, coordination, control and measurement, as prescribed by these authors.

From this perspective, it is important to establish sustainability indicators capable of measuring the socio-environmental performance of public organisations. Research into the application of social, environmental and economic sustainability indicators in higher education institutions could be mentioned at this point in the study, given the structural similarities between the environmental and social dimensions of public organisations and educational institutions, such as the existence of materials, sewage treatment, waste production and the demands of individuals. Therefore, considering the peculiarities experienced by higher education institutions, we highlight some of the main indicators proposed, such as number of teachers per course, number of teachers trained in some area of sustainability, number of civil servants hired by function, absence or presence of civil servants in sectors focused on sustainability, amount of spending on technicians, training, hiring, absence of accidents, amount of consumption of resources and materials per civil servant or department, amount of waste production per user, presence of sustainable tenders and number of projects developed in sustainability, as in the approach dealt with by Da Silva and De Azevedo Almeida (2019).

Indicators are parameters that serve to inform the situation of an element and, once formulated, help to identify the organisation’s current situation in relation to the objectives set for its socio-environmental development. In this way, indicators support decision-makers by helping to allocate resources, comparing processes and situations, pointing out future trends and, above all, measuring the results and impacts of decisions made, as indicated by Da Silva and De Azevedo Almeida (2019). To the extent that these practices are standardised, social and environmental management activities can be checked for adequacy, as well as contributing to the proper disclosure of information as a way of promoting social participation through compliance and accountability methodologies.