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The rapid rise of home-sharing and peer-to-peer accommodation has exposed new opportunities and issues in the hospitality industry. Given the heightened attention to and awareness of environmental issues in tourism and hospitality, this study explored the likelihood and motivations of Airbnb hosts towards participating in an environmental certification program. Currently, there are no such programs associated with Airbnb or this sector of the sharing economy. As part of this exploratory study, semi-structured interviews with Airbnb hosts in the Greater Toronto Area were conducted to uncover the opinions and motivations of Airbnb hosts towards participating in a potential program, and what program design elements would enhance their likelihood of participation. Results indicated a willingness to participate in an environmental certification program, driven by economic factors and personal values. Host opinions regarding preferred design elements provide insight into factors important to the development and success of such a potential program. Environmental certification is a common tool in tourism to signal environmental commitment by operators, but such a program does not yet exist for home-sharing.

Attention to ‘sustainability’ and energy efficiency rating schemes in the commercial property sector has increased rapidly during the past decade. In the UK, commercial properties have been certified under the BREEAM rating scheme since 1999, offering fertile ground to investigate the economic dynamics of ‘green’ certification in the commercial property market. This paper documents that, over the 2000–09 period, the expanding supply of green buildings within a given London neighbourhood had a positive impact on average rents and prices, but reduced rents and prices for environmentally certified real estate. The results suggest that there is a gentrification effect from green buildings. However, each additional “green” building decreases the marginal effect of certification in the rental and transaction markets by 2 per cent and 5 per cent respectively. In addition, controlling for lease contract features, like contract length and the rent-free period, modifies the impact of environmental certification on rental prices.

Sustainable entrepreneurship encourages a focus on innovation, efficiency and environmentally-friendly actions. Certification enables firms to accumulate legitimacy that enables stakeholders to know of, and understand, a firm’s activities: it is a mechanism to buffer against the liabilities of newness and smallness. Building on insights from the resource-based view of the firm, institutional theory and signalling theory, this article conceptualises environmental certification as an observable high-quality resource investment signal. This resource fosters innovation and encourages certified firms to accumulate and mobilise legitimacy. Regression analysis detected that very young and micro firms who cited the compounded signal of certification reported significantly higher levels of effectiveness. Micro firms that cited the compounded signal of certification reported weakly significantly higher levels profitability. Certification enables very young, rather than young firms, to address the liabilities of newness, and enables micro, rather than small firms, to address the liabilities of smallness.

Transnational certification and ecolabeling programs have become an important new site of environmental governance, as well as an emerging arena for action and conflict in international trade. This paper explores the implementation of Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) certification in salmon fisheries in the US state of Alaska in the early 2000s, the growing opposition within the industry to MSC certification through periods of reassessment, and the emergence of an alternative Alaska certification initiative in 2011. It suggests that these shifts were rooted in struggles over understudied third-party certification and labeling processes that we conceptualize as marketized governance. The paper further shows how certification and labeling can obscure and expose competing industry interests and power relations, provoke struggles over fisheries’ social representation, and open up novel avenues for cooperation and change, indicating ambiguity in the social and cultural implications of neoliberal modes of governance. Finally, the paper suggests that the ascendancy of the MSC has sparked the emergence of new political and economic geographies of certification and ecolabeling in Alaska and other jurisdictions where place-specific and other initiatives vie for governance and market legitimacy. Keywords: certification, neoliberal governance, Marine Stewardship Council, fisheries, Alaska

This article explores the relationship between hope and agency in the contexts of migrant rights activism and alternative trading relationships created through social and environmental certification systems. Using interviews with key respondents from nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), hope is assigned a positive role in the complex process of social change, providing that common goals can be agreed upon and achieved along the way. Two main layers of analysis emerge in this article. The first explores the relationship between hope and agency, with a particular focus on power, both enabling and coercive. Powerful groups can hijack hope, but also hope can be used to mobilize various marginalized groups to find a collective voice, eventually leading to empowerment. The power relations among groups determine how competing collective hopes play out in action. A second layer to the relationship between hope and action is the way in which hope effects social change. Through conceptualizing hope within the context of the change process, we address the relationship between hope, agency, and time. An important ingredient linking hope, agency, and time in a sustainable manner is the notion of empowerment.

[EN] In this article, we analyze the impact on hotels of the ISO 14001 environmental certification system from the customers perspective. Based on a comparison of customer ratings of 6,850 hotels in Spain with and without ISO 14001 certification, overall guests rate the hotels with ISO 14001 certification higher than those without the certification. These results are stronger for hotel comfort and hotel services compared with other hotel attributes. Moreover, the most significant differences were found in the upscale four-star hotels. While the study does not reveal causes for these findings, the implication is that the highest end five-star luxury hotels do not gain distinctive differentiation by having the ISO 14001 certification, while for three-star hotels, guests price sensitivity overrides environmental concerns. At the four-star level, however, hotels seem to be able to gain a distinct market advantage from environmental certification. For all hotels, the management discipline provided by ISO 14001 can provide a competitive advantage, The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The authors would like to thank the Center for Hospitality Research at Cornell University which hosted A. Peiró and M. Segarra as visiting scholars, and the Universitat Politècnica de València for supporting the research project PAID-06-2011-1879.