Abstract

It is necessary to highlight that sustainable entrepreneurship has become imperative for firms to attain economic development in light of environmental challenges. Nevertheless, there is little empirical research on the relationship between sustainable entrepreneurship practices and environmental responsibility among enterprises in the context of emerging economies like Lebanon. This study aims to address this gap by exploring the impact of sustainable entrepreneurship practices, namely green innovation, sustainable resource management, eco-friendly operations, and sustainability-oriented business strategies, on environmental responsibility among Lebanese firms. The uniqueness of the study is associated with the establishment of an integrated model that links sustainability-oriented entrepreneurship practices with the indicators of environmental responsibility, including waste minimization, energy efficiency, pollution prevention, environmental compliance, and conservation. A quantitative cross-sectional design was used to collect primary data from 300 Lebanese firms through a structured survey instrument. The results showed that sustainable entrepreneurship practices had a high mean score of 4.12, while environmental responsibility scored a mean value of 4.21, meaning that sustainability is highly adopted in the enterprises. Sustainability-oriented business strategies (Mean = 4.16) and sustainable resource management (Mean = 4.15) had a great impact on the sustainability performance. The reliability test showed that the Cronbach’s alpha values were 0.91 for sustainable entrepreneurship practices and 0.92 for environmental responsibility, where AVE values were above 0.50, which meant the validity of the constructs. Correlation analysis indicated that there was a strong positive relationship between sustainable entrepreneurship practices and environmental responsibility (r = 0.76, p < 0.01), where sustainability-oriented business strategies (r = 0.71) and eco-friendly business practices (r = 0.68) were associated with both constructs. This means that the results have proved that sustainable entrepreneurship practices significantly increase environmental responsibility.