Social responsibility and sustainability in motorway corporate governance

This paper analyses how a motorway concessionaire faces the challenge posed by the raise of road traffic volumes in the North-East of Italy. The concessionaire has planned to invest in the near future a large amount of money in the network upgrade. The construction phases will predictably induce the risk of traffic congestions. Then an intelligent traffic management system becomes necessary to support the management in making decisions on the traffic control, especially during emergencies and unusual conditions. In this perspective, the concessionaire is going to adopt a governance system and the related codes of conduct to operate also according to fundamental sustainability values. To this purpose, the balanced scorecard model is adopted. In particular this paper describes how the balanced scorecard model, originally developed for use in the private sector, has been adapted for use in a modern motorway concessionaire firm to estimate its corporate efficiency and to evaluate environmental and social performance.