Early literature on organizations and natural environment focused on analyzing the existence of a business case for environmental management and, as a consequence, multiple works have highlighted that the firms should voluntarily make environmental progress because it provides financial rewards; however, unfortunately, subsequent empirical findings and descriptive evidence are far away of being definitive about this. More recent institutional perspectives have emphasized that institutional stringency from strict legal and cultural pressures is a more homogeneous positive influence on firms’ environmentally progress, however previous research has paid limited attention to how institutional stringency may influence the relationship between a firm’s environmental progress and its financial performance. We accept this positive influence, but also predict that environmental institutional stringency has limited the firms’ opportunities to get benefits from their voluntary approaches. We use a meta-analysis of previous empirical studies to obtain statistically aggregating findings. After including all the published papers analyzing the business case for environmental management published from 2012 to 2016, we yielded a final sample of 70 studies, from which we obtained a total of 126 related correlations which are based on 17,152 observations of firms. Our results confirm that industry environmental institutional stringency influences negatively the relationship between a firm environmental progress and its financial performance. Additionally, regional stringency also reinforces this relationship. These results contribute to the institutional literature by helping to clear the distinctions between following institutional pressures and getting competitive advantage as a consequence”