An Institutional Approach to the Environmental Practices of Golf Courses

As it is well known, the number of golf courses has increased exponentially in many tourist destinations, which has generated a public debate about its environmental impact. In many Spanish destinations such as Andalusia, this sport has become one of the products with greater pull in their tourism off er, with signifi cant economic impact in this territory. All this has prompted the generation of a highly institutionalized context. Th is paper attempts to analyze this context in a sample of golf courses located in the Spanish region of Andalusia and to test empirically the relationships between environmental practices and institutional context with its corresponding coercive, normative and mimetic mechanisms. Finally, its relationship with the performance of these organizations is established, testing if a direct or indirect relationship exists through the search for legitimacy, as suggested by the Institutional Th eory.