The effectiveness of policy pressure in engendering firms’ better environmental performance is a hot issue on the current policy agenda, but the chance for firms to relocate their activities where environmental regulations are less stringent may undermine the effectiveness of the policy instruments designed to reduce polluting emissions. By investigating policy-related and strategy-related elements on Italian manufacturing firms, in the paper ‘Governing offshoring in a stringent environmental policy setting: Evidence from Italian manufacturing firms. Journal of Cleaner Production‘ we suggest that offshoring decisions relate more to a firm’s self-imposed pressure to reduce its environmental impact by means of an appropriate environmental sustainability strategy and on its overall market and ICT strategy rather then by policy stringency. This is especially true when it comes to FDI (as respect to international outsourcing). Furthermore, such a conclusion holds when considering offshoring decision in developing countries as well, even if in here policy stringency plays a slightly larger role.