Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to establish and advance the role of academic accounting in the pursuit of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which are regarded as the most ...salient point of departure for understanding and achieving environmental and human development ambitions up to (and no doubt beyond) the year 2030.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper provides a synthesis of interdisciplinary perspectives on sustainable development and integration of this with the accounting for sustainability literature. In addition, potential accounting research contributions are proposed so as to support the development of new research avenues.
Findings
Existing research in accounting that is relevant to individual SDGs serves as an initial link between them and the accounting discipline. At the same time, the SDGs focus highlights new sites for empirical work (including interdisciplinary investigations) as well as inviting innovation in accounting theoretical frameworks. Moreover, the SDGs provide a context for (re)invigorating accounting’s contribution to sustainable development debates.
Originality/value
This is the first paper to explore the roles academic accounting can play in furthering achievement of the SDGs through enhanced understanding, critiquing and advancing of accounting policy, practice and theorizing. It is also the first paper to propose a research agenda in this area.
Green growth has proven to be politically popular, but economically elusive.Can Green Sustain Growth? asks how we can move from theoretical support to implementation, and argues that this leap will ...require radical experimentation. But systemic change is costly, and a sweeping shift cannot be accomplished without political support, not to mention large-scale cooperation between business and government.
Insightful and timely, this book brings together eight original, international case studies to consider what we can learn from the implementation of green growth strategies to date. This analysis reveals that coalitions for green experimentation emerge and survive when they link climate solutions to specific problems with near-term benefits that appeal to both environmental and industrial interests. Based on these findings, the volume delivers concrete policy recommendations for the next steps in the necessary shift toward sustainable prosperity.
•Sustainable Development Goals have been drafted and endorsed recently.•The SDGs and their targets have laid an overall policy framework; however, the conceptual one for indicator development is ...missing.•We stress the need to conceptualise and operationalise the targets with focus on the indicators’ relevance.
At the UN in New York the Open Working Group created by the UN General Assembly proposed a set of global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) which comprises 17 goals and 169 targets. Further to that, a preliminary set of 330 indicators was introduced in March 2015. Some SDGs build on preceding Millennium Development Goals while others incorporate new ideas. A critical review has revealed that indicators of varied quality (in terms of the fulfilment certain criteria) have been proposed to assess sustainable development. Despite the fact that there is plenty of theoretical work on quality standards for indicators, in practice users cannot often be sure how adequately the indicators measure the monitored phenomena. Therefore we stress the need to operationalise the Sustainable Development Goals’ targets and evaluate the indicators’ relevance, the characteristic of utmost importance among the indicators’ quality traits. The current format of the proposed SDGs and their targets has laid a policy framework; however, without thorough expert and scientific follow up on their operationalisation the indicators may be ambiguous. Therefore we argue for the foundation of a conceptual framework for selecting appropriate indicators for targets from existing sets or formulating new ones. Experts should focus on the “indicator-indicated fact” relation to ensure the indicators’ relevance in order for clear, unambiguous messages to be conveyed to users (decision- and policy-makers and also the lay public). Finally we offer some recommendations for indicators providers in order to contribute to the tremendous amount of conceptual work needed to lay a strong foundation for the development of the final indicators framework.
If businesses and other organizations are to meet the many and complex challenges of sustainable development, then they all, both public and private, need to embed sustainability considerations into ...their decision-making and reporting. However, the translation of this aspiration into effective action is often inhibited by the lack of systems and procedures that take sustainability into account.
Accounting for Sustainability: Practical Insights will help organizations to address these issues. The book sets out a number of tools and approaches that have been developed and applied by leading organizations to:
embed sustainability into decision-making, extending beyond an organization's boundaries to take into account suppliers, customers and other stakeholders;
measure and link sustainability and financial performance;
integrate sustainability into 'mainstream' reporting, both to management and external stakeholders.
In-depth cases studies from Aviva, BT, the Environment Agency, EDF Energy, HSBC, Novo Nordisk, Sainsbury's and West Sussex County Council show in detail how accounting for sustainability works in practice in a wide range of organizational contexts.
Published with The Prince's Charities: Accounting for Sustainability
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