Routledge Handbook of Environmental Accounting

Jan Bebbington, Carlos Larrinaga, Brendan O'Dwyer, Ian Thomson, Jan Bebbington, Carlos Larrinaga, Brendan O'Dwyer, Ian Thomson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780429620959
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Contabilità
• Index: Business

This handbook showcases the broad spectrum of diverse approaches to environmental accounting which have developed during the last 30 years across the globe.

The volume covers a range of physical issues such as water, carbon and biodiversity, as well as specific accounting matters such as management control, finance and audit. Moreover, seven chapters present environmental accounting issues that arise in the regions of Africa, Asia, Europe, MENA, North America, the Pacific and South America. The handbook also highlights future challenges in all the topic areas addressed as well as introducing new topics, such as links between environmental accounting and the circular economy, and the issues associated with animal rights. Edited by leading scholars in the area and with key contributions from across the discipline, and covering a diverse range of perspectives and locations, the volume is divided into five key parts:

• Part 1: Framing the issues

• Part 2: Financial accounting and reporting

• Part 3: Management accounting

• Part 4: Global and local perspectives

• Part 5: Thematic topics in environmental accounting

This handbook will act as a significant publication in drawing together the history of the field and important reference points in its future development, and will serve as a vital resource for students and scholars of environmental accounting and environmental economics.

Part 1

Framing the issues

1

Curating environmental accounting knowledge

Jan Bebbington, Carlos Larrinaga and Ian Thomson

Introduction

In this handbook, we date the start of a distinctive field of academic inquiry into the “hybrid” of accounting and the natural environment to Gray (1990). Thirty years on, it is a suitable time to present chapters dedicated to elements of the field as well as to identify challenges that remain. We are indebted to the large team of writers who contributed chapters for this handbook and who responded in a positive way to our deadlines and editorial suggestions. This substantive piece of work was only possible because of the network of authors who have been working on this material for the last 18 months and we thank them all.

We approached this handbook as a “knowledge project” and in gathering this material together we thought of ourselves as curators of a variety of perspectives and insights. At the same time, we hope the synergy created by virtue of having these contributions in one place (and edited by a common team) might also generate overarching insights into environmental accounting. With these hopes in mind, this chapter undertakes several tasks, namely, it:

• describes the nature of the problem that environmental accounting seeks to address (including a consideration of the social aspects of environmental change);
• outlines the practice and other academic partners who have strengthened environmental accounting research;
• considers how future accountants might become ecologically literate, focusing on the role of accounting education (in universities and professional training/continuing education); and
• provides some reflections that emerge from having read the handbook as a whole and which may provide a glimpse into some of the contours of future environmental accounting.

Before moving onto these various topic areas, we also wished to provide some personal reflections on environmental accounting (see also Bebbington, Russell and Thomson 2017).

We all started our careers around 1990 and hence were part of the “first generation” of scholars who had the opportunity to dedicate themselves to researching environmental accounting. This opportunity was afforded to us by the leadership of the pioneers of the field including Rob Gray, James Guthrie, Richard Laughlin, Reg Matthews, Keith Maunders, Dave Owen and Lee Parker. This handbook is possible because of their vision and leadership over many decades. Moreover, this group of scholars (along with the “first generation”) engaged in institutional building that created, sustained, expanded and legitimated environmental accounting scholarship and practice. Elements of this process included the adoption of the pre-existing Social Accounting Monitor (which eventually became the Social and Environmental Accountability Journal) and the founding of the Centre for Social and Environmental Accounting Research (CSEAR) and the development of a series of specialist conferences to support scholars in the area (of which more will be discussed later).

Part of the excitement of being around at the start of an academic field was that we experienced its development first-hand rather than trying to piece the field together from academic literature. As a result, the handbook has sought to shed light on the (sometimes hidden and/or forgotten) foundations of environmental accounting (see especially Chapter 2). At the same time, a retrospective should also seek to identify missed opportunities, false turns, dead ends as well as a foundation from which to look forward as to what practice, policy and scholarship might emerge in the future. These desires shaped the structure and content of the handbook: some chapters deal with material that is still in embryonic form (e.g. accounting for circularity in Chapter 18 and accounting for animal rights in Chapter 29) while others deal with as yet unresolved issues of long-standing concern (such as “stand-alone” reporting in Chapter 8). That being said, most of the chapters reflect on the origins, current status and future shape of their respective topics.

In commissioning the chapters (and in conceptualising this handbook as a knowledge project), we also wanted diversity in the author set. We deliberately invited scholars who might be described as “second generation” environmental accounting researchers to contribute their perspectives. These colleagues will have the responsibility of shaping environmental accounting in the next 20–30 years through their research, supervision of PhD students, editing of journals and through the influence they will exert on policy and professional processes in their respective countries and regions.

In addition, and as with any academic field, the development of environmental accounting reflects a number of privileges and biases. These biases include gender, race, language, culture and geographical dimensions. We integrated these concerns in our commissioning process so that we could create a space for voices that are less often heard within the field. Intellectually, fostering diversity also supports addressing the globally connected nature of the natural environment (this is one hallmark of sustainability science – see Bebbington and Larrinaga 2014). There are also contemporary reasons for this strategy. The implications of the Black Lives Matter movement, the recognition of white privilege, the dominance of male voices/perspectives and the ongoing struggles of indigenous peoples against colonisation are issues for accounting scholars. The environmental accounting literature (in our view) currently suffers from a concentration on Western concerns and contexts as well as from being communicated primarily in English (see Chapter 25 for an explicit consideration of this problem). We accept that this handbook does not perfectly address the biases we identify, but we have sought to dilute them by drawing from a diverse author field as well as including a dedicated section on regional perspectives.

Taken together, this handbook is intended to mark a transition in environmental accounting: a transition that respects the past, present and future scholars involved in the collective co-production of environmental accounting theory, evidence, policy and practice. The inclusion of different voices from different places enables new insights to be drawn, while reducing the risk of finding in one study inadvertently oppressing those in another domain. Given that we curated (rather than orchestrated) this process, there remain areas of contradiction, contestation and friction between the materials presented. We did not seek to hide these tensions, but rather see this as evidence of an active, authentic research field that is struggling to make sense of our, often abusive, relationship with nature. It is to the outcomes of that relationship that attention now turns.

Defining the problem arena

Environment and accounting linkages

Bebbington and Thomson (2013, p. 281) highlighted that accounting seeks to respond to concerns “that economic systems (embedded in systems of cultural expectations) create outcomes that undermine the ecological systems on which human (and other species) prosperity rests”. Any concern with the(a) state of the environment is therefore also a concern about the economic and social systems that co-created these challenges. It is also the case that science (as one possible knowledge system) has been narrating the myriad ways in which individual and collective human actions have affected the functioning of the environment, including phenomena such as: global climate change; biodiversity loss; the translocation of organisms; disruption to water, nitrogen and phosphorus cycles; the mass movement of materials within natural systems; and the creation of novel materials which have no parallel in nature. The extent and complexity of specific environmental changes have led to the current time being characterised as the Anthropocene: denoting an era where human actions are a perceptible driver of earth system processes (see Bebbington et al. 2020 for an introduction). Taken together there are concerns that this process will lead to simplified and less robust ecosystems (Nyström et al. 2019) and to the breaching of “planetary boundaries” (Rockstrom et al. 2009), beyond which all living beings will be threatened. It is within the context of these concerns that environmental accounting seeks to intervene.

At its core, environmental accounting focuses on...